Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer of Anthropic, officially stepped down from the board of Figma, a leading interface design company, on April 14th. This change was disclosed by Figma to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This major personnel change followed a deep report by Xinxi Bao, which claimed that Anthropic's upcoming next-generation model Opus4.7 will integrate native design tools, meaning that this top AI lab will shift from being a core model partner of Figma to becoming a direct competitor in its core design business.
Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, joined Anthropic in 2024 and entered Figma's board less than a year ago. Although Figma is currently deeply integrating Anthropic's models to enhance its user experience design tools, Krieger's departure signals overlapping product boundaries between the two companies. With Anthropic rejecting an $8 billion acquisition offer (doubling its initial fundraising valuation), its ambition for independent expansion has become increasingly evident.
This event has further intensified concerns in the capital market about the "SaaS apocalypse theory," where leading AI labs use their model capabilities to penetrate downstream application layers, potentially reshaping the software industry ecosystem. Affected by such sentiments, the software industry benchmark ETF IGV has declined nearly 18% this year. Although Figma's stock price unexpectedly rose by 5% after the departure announcement, it remains to be seen whether AI-native applications can truly challenge the accumulated domain expertise and customer relationships of established software companies, as the actual market performance of Opus4.7 needs to be observed.
