Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol
Figma said it plans to support as many standards as possible without exposing all of its data
Despite Figma co-founder Dylan Fieldβs 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 companyβs 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 MCPβs 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.
βI find it interesting that Anthropic (creators of MCP standard) do not expose artifacts/other cloud resources created via MCP,β he wrote on X. βThe debate is framed as open vs closed. Everyone always prefers openΒ β¦ obviously. And meanwhile issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored.β
(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.
β 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 doesnβt think MCP is a perfect protocol.
βIβm really excited about what weβre 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,β the co-founder responded. βIt 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.β
Figmaβs CEO said that the reason the company doesnβt 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 donβt 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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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
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