At its first Config conference in India, Figma announced 20 new partners that can work with design data through MCP, the Model Context Protocol. MCP is an open standard that lets AI agents plug into outside services and tools. The list includes Linear, Notion, ClickUp, Mistral, the Dia browser, JetBrains Junie, OpenCode and others.
At the same time, Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field openly questions the protocol itself. In his view MCP is far from ideal, has plenty of room to improve, and in its current form mostly favours the big model makers.
Where the argument started
Shortly before the announcement, one of the MCP co-creators criticised Figma for not supporting the open tool Pi. Field replied with a question of his own: why does Anthropic, which created the standard, not expose artifacts and other cloud resources made on its platform through MCP? He called it an asymmetry: services are expected to be fully open, while context does not flow back the other way.
Why Figma does not open everything
At a press briefing Field explained the company's stance. Figma wants an open ecosystem and understands people who simply want easy access to their own designs. But the more data is reachable through MCP, the higher the risk of abuse. Most users mean no harm, yet the company still has to plan for the worst cases.
Our take
For web builders this is good news: Figma designs are getting easier to hand to AI agents and code editors, which shortens the road from mockup to markup. Field's words deserve attention too: MCP is still a young standard and its access and security questions are not fully settled. Give agents only the permissions they really need. Details are in TechCrunch's report.