GoKawiilIn Brief
Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from the board of interface design company Figma on April 14.
His departure was disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by the publicly traded $10 billion company the same day that The Information reported Anthropic’s next model, Opus 4.7, will include design tools that could compete with Figma’s primary offering.
Figma is the developer of a popular tool for user experience designers who build interfaces for websites and apps. The company has collaborated closely with Anthropic to integrate the frontier lab’s AI models into its products as assistants for its users.
Krieger, who previously co-founded Instagram and the AI-powered news app Artifact, became the top product executive at Anthropic in 2024 and joined the board of Figma less than a year ago.
Krieger’s departure and any forthcoming design tools will be another data point for investors who fear the SaaSpocalypse — that the largest AI labs will come to dominate software businesses, a thesis that has rocked public markets at times this year. For example, iShares’s primary software ETF, IGV, is down nearly 18% this year.
Anthropic, meanwhile, is turning down investors who want to buy into the company at $800 billion — more than double the valuation from its most recent round at the beginning of the year.
But companies like Anthropic and OpenAI still have to prove their ultra-capable models can truly replicate the domain experience and relationships of established software brands. Figma’s stock price is up 5% since Krieger’s departure was disclosed, though we’ll see what happens with the next Opus release.