Anthropic just launched Claude Design, an AI tool that turns prompts into prototypes and challenges Figma

Anthropic today launched Claude Design, a new product from its Anthropic Labs division that allows users to create polished visual work — designs, interactive prototypes, slide decks, one-pagers, and marketing collateral — through conversational prompts and fine-grained editing controls. The release, available immediately in research preview to all paid Claude subscribers, is the company's most aggressive expansion beyond its core language model business and into the application layer that has historically belonged to companies like Figma, Adobe, and Canva.

Claude Design is powered by Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's most capable generally available vision model, which the company also released today. Anthropic says it is rolling access out gradually throughout the day to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

The simultaneous launches mark a watershed for Anthropic, whose ambitions now visibly extend from foundation model provider to full-stack product company — one that wants to own the arc from a rough idea to a shipped product. The timing is also significant: Anthropic hit roughly $20 billion in annualized revenue in early March 2026, according to Bloomberg, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — and surpassed $30 billion by early April 2026. The company is in early talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about a potential IPO that could come as early as October 2026.

How Claude Design turns a text prompt into a working prototype

The product follows a workflow that Anthropic has designed to feel like a natural creative conversation. Users describe what they need, and Claude generates a first version. From there, refinement happens through a combination of channels: chat-based conversation, inline comments on specific elements, direct text editing, and custom adjustment sliders that Claude itself generates to let users tweak spacing, color, and layout in real time.

During onboarding, Claude reads a team's codebase and design files and builds a design system — colors, typography, and components — that it automatically applies to every subsequent project. Teams can refine the system over time and maintain more than one. The import surface is broad: users can start from a text prompt, upload images and documents in various formats, or point Claude at their codebase. A web capture tool grabs elements directly from a live website so prototypes look like the real product.

What distinguishes Claude Design from the wave of AI design experiments that have proliferated in the past year is the handoff mechanism. When a design is ready to build, Claude packages everything into a handoff bundle that can be passed to Claude Code with a single instruction. That creates a closed loop — exploration to prototype to production code — all within Anthropic's ecosystem. The export options acknowledge that not everyone's next step is Claude Code: users can also share designs as an internal URL within their organization, save as a folder, or export to Canva, PDF, PPTX, or standalone HTML files.

Anthropic points to Brilliant, the education technology company known for intricate interactive lessons, as an early proof point. The company's senior product designer reported that the most complex pages required 20 or more prompts to recreate in competing tools but needed only 2 in Claude Design. The Brilliant team then turned static mockups into interactive prototypes they could share and user-test without code review, and handed everything — including the design intent — to Claude Code for implementation. Datadog's product team described a similar shift, compressing what had been a week-long cycle of briefs, mockups, and review rounds into a single conversation.

Why Anthropic's chief product officer just resigned from Figma's board

The launch arrives against a backdrop that makes Anthropic's claim of complementarity with existing design tools difficult to take entirely at face value. Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, resigned from the board of Figma on April 14 — the same day The Information reported Anthropic's next model would include design tools that could compete with Figma's primary offering.

Figma has collaborated closely with Anthropic to integrate the frontier lab's AI models into its products. Just two months ago, in February, Figma launched "Code to Canvas," a feature that converts code generated in AI tools like Claude Code into fully editable designs inside Figma — creating a bridge between AI coding tools and Figma's design process. The partnership felt like a mutual bet that AI would make design more essential, not less. Claude Design complicates that narrative significantly.

Anthropic's position, based on VentureBeat's background conversations with the company, is that Claude Design is built around interoperability and is meant to meet teams where they already work, not replace incumbent tools. The company points to the Canva export, PPTX and PDF support, and plans to make it easier for other tools to connect via MCPs (model context protocols) as evidence of that philosophy. Anthropic is also making it possible for other tools to build integrations with Claude Design, a move clearly designed to preempt accusations of walled-garden ambitions.

But the market read the signals differently. The structural tension is clear: Figma commands an estimated 80 to 90% market share in UI and UX design, according to The Next Web. Both Figma and Adobe assume a trained designer is in the loop. Anthropic's tool does not. Claude Design is not merely another AI copilot embedded in an existing design application. It is a standalone product that generates complete, interactive prototypes from natural language — accessible to founders, product managers, and marketers who have never opened Figma. The expansion of the design user base to non-designers is the real competitive threat, even if the professional designer's workflow remains anchored in Figma for now.

Inside Claude Opus 4.7, the model Anthropic deliberately made less dangerous

The model powering Claude Design is itself a significant story. Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's most capable generally available model, with notable improvements over its predecessor Opus 4.6 in software engineering, instruction following, and vision — but it is intentionally less capable than Anthropic's most powerful offering, Claude Mythos Preview, the model the company announced earlier this month as too dangerous for broad release due to its cybersecurity capabilities.

That dual-track approach — one model for the public, one model locked behind a vetted-access program — is unprecedented in the AI industry. Anthropic used Claude Mythos Preview to identify thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, as reported by multiple outlets. The Project Glasswing initiative that houses Mythos brings together Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks as launch partners.

Opus 4.7 sits a deliberate step below Mythos. Anthropic stated in its release that it "experimented with efforts to differentially reduce" the new model's cyber capabilities during training and ships it with safeguards that automatically detect and block requests indicating prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses. What Anthropic learns from those real-world safeguards will inform the eventual goal of broader release for Mythos-class models. For security professionals with legitimate needs, the company has created a new Cyber Verification Program.

On benchmarks, the model posts strong numbers. Opus 4.7 reached 64.3% on SWE-bench Pro, and on Anthropic's internal 93-task coding benchmark, it delivered a 13% resolution improvement over Opus 4.6, including solving four tasks that neither Opus 4.6 nor Sonnet 4.6 could crack.

The vision improvements are substantial and directly relevant