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Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol

Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol

Design aillm TechCrunch
Figma co-founder Dylan Field is expanding MCP integration while publicly criticizing the protocol as being skewed toward frontier AI labs.
What: Figma announced 20 new partners for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), including Linear and Notion. Field expressed concerns that MCP lacks symmetry in data sharing and poses security abuse risks if too much Figma data is exposed.
Why it matters: This conflict highlights the friction between the push for universal AI interoperability and the proprietary concerns of established SaaS platforms needing to gatekeep sensitive user data.
Deep dive
  • Figma is integrating with 20 new MCP partners while simultaneously questioning the protocol's design.
  • Co-founder Dylan Field argues MCP currently favors frontier AI labs over broader ecosystem participants.
  • Field criticized Anthropic for not exposing its own artifacts through the very standard it created.
  • Figma plans to support the open-source tool Pi to improve interoperability.
  • The company remains cautious about full data exposure to mitigate potential abuse and security vulnerabilities.
  • The debate centers on the tension between open standards and the business need for controlled data access.
Decoder
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard designed to enable AI assistants to connect with external systems and data sources.
  • Frontier AI labs: Organizations like OpenAI or Anthropic that are leading the current state-of-the-art developments in large language models.
Original article

Despite Figma co-founder Dylan Field’s concerns about MCP (model context protocol), which standardizes how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools, the company is expanding its support for the open source standard.

At the design company’s first Config conference held in India, the company announced 20 new MCP partners, including Amp, ClickUp, Dia, Junie by JetBrains, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode, and Sarvam Agents.

Field has expressed his misgivings about MCP before. Days before this announcement, one of MCP’s co-creators complained about Figma not supporting the open source tool Pi. As part of his response, Field made a comment about Anthropic not making its various resources available via MCP.

“I find it interesting that Anthropic (creators of MCP standard) do not expose artifacts/other cloud resources created via MCP,” he wrote on X. “The debate is framed as open vs closed. Everyone always prefers open … obviously. And meanwhile issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored.”

(Field later added that Figma plans support Pi.)

Can you help me understand why you don't make various Anthropic resources available via MCP? Maybe I'm missing something.

— Dylan Field (@zoink) September 30, 2026

At a media briefing, I asked Field about this debate. The co-founder explained that while Figma wants to be open, he doesn’t think MCP is a perfect protocol.

“I’m really excited about what we’re doing in terms of opening up our ecosystem. I also think that MCP is not a perfect protocol. And I think that it is something that has tons of room for improvement,” the co-founder responded. “It is advantaged more to frontier labs. Also, I understand everyone online who just wants a protocol that they can use when they want to use their Figma data, and I want them to use it, too.”

Figma’s CEO said that the reason the company doesn’t want to be fully open is that the more data the company exposes through MCP, the higher the chance of abuse.

He also clarified that while most users don’t intend to use MCP or Figma data in a malicious way, the company still has to think about those potential risks.

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