Anthropic CPO leaves Figma’s board after reports he will offer a competing product - TechCrunch

So Anthropic's Mike Krieger has decided that the best way to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest is to resign from Figma's board only after TechCrunch reported that his company's next model, Opus 4.7, will include design tools that directly compete with Figma's core product. Because nothing says 'ethical governance' like waiting for the press to catch wind of your plans before taking the most obvious step. The timing is impeccable—resignation follows reports, not precedes them, giving us all a masterclass in corporate choreography.

This little dance reveals the delightful tension at the heart of the 'AI lab as platform' fantasy. Anthropic, which positioned itself as the responsible alternative with its carefully gated Project Glasswing we flagged last week, now finds itself potentially eating the lunch of a company whose board its CPO sat on. The report specifically mentions 'fears that AI labs may dominate software businesses'—fears that seem rather validated when your chief product officer needs to resign because your next model threatens to make redundant the very company you're supposedly advising. It's not a conflict of interest; it's a preview of consolidation.

What's particularly charming is how this plays out against the backdrop of Anthropic's carefully cultivated image as the thoughtful, safety-first lab. While they're limiting access to Claude Mythos to 40 corporations for 'analysis', they're simultaneously developing tools that could dismantle entire software categories. The gap between the responsible rhetoric and the competitive reality is widening by the day. One wonders how many more board resignations we'll see as AI labs realize their models don't just complement existing software—they aim to replace it, one conflicted directorship at a time.