Despite Figma co-founder Dylan Field’s concerns about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardizes how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools, the company is expanding its support for open source standards.
At the design firm’s first Config conference in India, the company announced 20 new Model Context Protocol (MCP) partners, including Amp, ClickUp, Dia, Junie by JetBrains, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode, and Sarvam Agents.
Field has previously expressed concerns about MCP. A few days before this announcement, one of MCP’s co-creators complained about Figma’s lack of support for the open source tool Pi. As part of his response, Mr. Field commented on Anthropic’s failure to make various resources available via MCP.
“I find it interesting that Anthropic (creator of the MCP standard) does not expose artifacts or other cloud resources created via MCP,” he wrote to X. “This debate is framed as open versus closed. Everyone always prefers open…obviously. Meanwhile, the issue of asymmetric context sharing is ignored.”
(Field later added that Figma will support Pi.)
At the press conference, I asked Mr. Field about this discussion. The co-founder explained that Figma wants to be open, but doesn’t believe MCP is a perfect protocol.
“I’m really excited about what we’re doing in terms of opening up the ecosystem, and I also don’t think MCP is a perfect protocol, and I think there’s a lot of room for improvement,” the co-founders responded. “This is more advantageous for Frontier Labs. I also understand that everyone online wants a protocol that they can use when they want to use Figma data. I want them to use it too.”
Figma’s CEO said the reason the company doesn’t want to be completely open is because the more data the company exposes through MCP, the more likely it is to be misused.
He also clarified that while most users do not intend to use MCP or Figma data in malicious ways, the company still needs to consider these potential risks.
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