Design enters its frenemies era

It was the shock that the design world didn’t see coming, but should have. In mid-April, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched a stand-alone design tool called Claude Design. No matter that Google had already tried the same thing with its platform Stitch, and there were also plenty of perfectly good vibe coding tools on the market. The possibility that Anthropic—the same AI company known for upending product development by rapidly commoditizing code—was coming for design next introduced a sudden urgency into the conversation around design tools and automation. Friends suddenly looked a lot more like competitors. Designer-influencers reacted in hyperbolic doomerism. Investors concurred that Claude’s aspirations spelled danger for design tools, and Figma’s stock dropped approximately 7% the day of the announcement, while Adobe’s was knocked down by around 2.5%. That’s the way competition works in any industry. But in this case, Figma and Adobe (alongside Canva, which is privately owned) are all long-standing partners with Anthropic. I connected with the three design companies following the news. For the most part, even Anthropic’s own partners in the design tool world seemed surprised by the announcement. And I can say with certainty that the acting product design teams at Figma and Adobe had no idea that a competitive product from Anthropic was about to drop. While this is all just business, the announcement underscored what has been increasingly clear for a while now: Design—as judged by the tools its practitioners use, at least—is in a messy moment where it can feel like design is eating itself. Why everybody collabs with Anthropic This particular moment was so surprising to the design tools industry because, for the most part, new AI frontier model companies have been playing nicely with incumbents. Figma (like Adobe and Canva) has been operating under a multiyear collaboration with Anthropic to integrate Claude into Figma and Figma into Claude. Yes, it’s