Anthropic vs. Figma – Question of Focus

Anthropic needs focus.

• Anthropic is coming after Figma’s business in a move that arguably shows the same lack of focus that is plaguing OpenAI, which in turn, may cause the company to struggle to become a going concern.
• Figma is a user experience design tool that is used by many large and small companies to design the user experience of their websites and apps.
• Figma is a competitor to Adobe but is very focused on one niche of as opposed to Adobe, which focuses more widely on the creative industry.
• Hence, when an Anthropic employee resigns from the board of Figma, it is time to sit up and pay attention.
• Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, has resigned from the board of Figma, I presume, to avoid any conflicts of interest that may result in the future.
• It was widely expected that Opus 4.7 would include tools that compete directly with Figma, but there is no sign of these in the initial release.
• The only thing I can see is enhanced vision capabilities where higher resolution images are now supported, which would be essential to any offering designed to compete with Figma or Adobe.
• I suspect that this means that the tools are not quite ready for general release, and the resignation of Mr Krieger implies that they will be released sometime soon.
• At a high level, this appears to pose an existential threat to both Figma and Adobe, but I think that the reality is more nuanced than that.
• LLMs have improved greatly in both their reliability and accuracy over the last 12 months, but they do still make mistakes and operate in a way that is a complete mystery to the user.
• As a result, no rational company is going to risk being exposed to copyright lawsuits or the exposure of their trade secrets, and so they will not let an LLM wander randomly inside their corporation.
• This is why there has been very little adoption of OpenClaw-like agents despite the frenzy of excitement and speculation that the release of the tool created.
• What we will see is the release of what I refer to as Closed Claw (see here) where AI and software companies release their own versions of this but in a way where agent activities are fully controlled and their actions monitored and traceable.
• I suspect that the same thing is true when it comes to Figma and Adobe, both of whom already have partnerships with Anthropic that allow their customers to access the best Anthropic has to offer, but with the control and security that they need.
• If Anthropic is going to have a credible offering in this business, it is this that it will need to mimic as just launching a load of tools will not be enough.
• This requires a level of expertise that Anthropic does not have, and in its headlong race with OpenAI and Google to develop superintelligent AI and burning billions of dollars on compute, this contributes to a loss of focus that the company can not really afford.
• Once it is safely cash positive, then it will have the management bandwidth to turn its hand more broadly, but at the moment, I think that its partnership with Figma and Adobe is enough to keep the tokens selling.
• Consequently, I think that Anthropic’s lack of focus may make it harder to compete with Adobe and Figma, as management will be too thinly spread and it will not monetise its existing service as well as it could if it were more focused.
• This will give it less time and fewer resources to focus on competing with Figma and Adobe.
• At the end of the day, once the company is a going concern, then it will be in a position to become more vertically integrated, and if it holds its valuation, then it is probably better off acquiring either Adobe or Figma or both rather than doing it all itself.
• This is why I continue to think that there are companies in the software sector (that has been broadly cut in half) that will thrive as a result of AI rather than be decimated by it.
• Hence, good companies are still on sale, where my top two choices remain Adobe and Service Now both of which I have added to recently following war-related weakness and AI panic.
• I think Figma is not under threat here, but the stock is down nearly 80%, and it is still extremely expensive on a PER and growth basis, and so there is much better value to be had elsewhere which is why I don’t own it.