The Design Stack of the Future
How Canva and Anthropic took another piece out of Figma with simultaneous flagship AI design releases
Canva’s April 16 “AI 2.0” relaunch turned the design tool into an agentic platform with cross-application integrations. Anthropic’s Claude Design arrived the following day as a new Labs product for turning prompts and codebases into prototypes, decks, and UI mockups. Both landed in a category that has spent the past year reorganizing around natural-language creation and agentic workflows.
Canva goes agentic
The launch, described by Canva as its biggest product update since the company’s 2013 debut, replaced the template-based model with a conversational agent platform. Users describe what they need in natural language, refine through conversation, and rely on persistent memory that retains brand and style across sessions. Agents can reach into a team’s other software, including Gmail, Slack, Drive, and Zoom, to turn a recorded meeting into a structured report, pull research from a Slack thread, or assemble a morning brief from an inbox. A companion feature called Canva Code 2.0 converts plain-language descriptions into interactive web experiences that remain editable inside Canva’s visual editor. Canva reports 265 million monthly users, most of whom will see the AI 2.0 interface as it rolls out over the coming weeks.
Canva built the system on its own multimodal models. COO Cliff Obrecht told Fortune that those models are roughly seven times faster and thirty times cheaper than comparable frontier models. Canva’s acquisitions over the past two years laid the groundwork, starting with Leonardo AI in 2024 and, more recently, the agent-building platform Simtheory and the marketing-automation firm Ortto. Pricing runs from a free tier with limited premium credits up to a $100-per-month tier that Obrecht described as “almost all-you-can-eat.” A separate partnership with Anthropic brings Canva’s design engine into Claude as a research preview rolling out to the first million users.
New tools for Claude
Anthropic launched Claude Design, powered by its newly released Opus 4.7 vision model, on April 17 as a research preview for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. The product takes prompts, uploaded documents, reference images, or a linked codebase and produces prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and UI mockups. Refinement happens through inline comments, direct edits, and custom sliders that the model generates for fine-grained control over spacing, color, and layout. Anthropic positions the product for non-designers such as founders, product managers, and marketers, along with designers who want to explore more directions faster.
During onboarding, Claude Design reads a team’s codebase and existing design files to build a design system that it then applies automatically to every future project. Teams can refine the system over time and maintain more than one, so that it keeps pace as a company’s visual identity evolves. A completed design can go directly into Canva, where it becomes fully editable and collaborative, or into a handoff bundle that Claude Code picks up for implementation. In a statement to TechCrunch, Anthropic described Claude Design as a complement to Canva.
Figma under pressure
The two launches arrived in a category that has been reshuffling for months, with different tools staking claim to different parts of the work from idea to shipped product. Prompt-to-app builders like Lovable, Vercel’s v0, and StackBlitz’s Bolt take natural-language descriptions and produce running full-stack applications complete with a database and deployment. Google’s Stitch 2.0 shipped in March, introducing voice canvas and an infinite canvas for generating multi-screen flows, and knocking roughly twelve percent off Figma’s stock over two days. A week later, Figma opened its canvas to external coding agents through the Model Context Protocol, letting tools like Claude Code and Cursor create and edit components directly inside a team’s design system. Claude Design’s debut cost Figma another seven percent on launch day last week, adding to a year in which Figma’s share price has fallen roughly a third.
Competitor or collaborator?
Both launches build in a soft coexistence, with Canva’s design engine embedded inside Claude and Claude Design exporting directly into Canva. That coexistence holds only as long as each tool remains clearly best at what it does. Anthropic’s promised integrations for Claude Design over the coming weeks will be the first indication of whether the category continues to splinter or begins to consolidate around a handful of tools that interoperate cleanly.