Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from the board of interface design company Figma on April 14th.
His departure was disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by the $10 billion publicly traded company on the same day that the Information reported that Anthropic’s next model, the Opus 4.7, would include design tools that could compete with Figma’s flagship product.
Figma is the developer of tools popular with user experience designers who build interfaces for websites and apps. The company worked closely with Anthropic to integrate Frontier Labs’ AI models into its products as user assistants.
Krieger, who previously co-founded Instagram and AI-powered news app Artifact, became Anthropic’s head of product in 2024 and joined Figma’s board less than a year later.
Krieger’s departure and upcoming design tools will provide another data point for investors fearful of SaaSpocalypse. SaaSpocalypse, the theory that the largest AI labs will come to dominate the software business, has rocked public markets at times this year. For example, iShares’ flagship software ETF, IGV, is down nearly 18% this year.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has turned down investors who wanted to buy the company for $800 billion, more than double the valuation from its most recent round earlier this year.
But companies like Anthropic and OpenAI need to prove that their ultra-high-performance models can truly replicate the domain experiences and relationships of established software brands. Figma’s stock is up 5% since Krieger’s departure was revealed, but we’ll see what happens with the next Opus release.
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