Figma Adds 20 MCP Partners While Its CEO Calls the Protocol Flawed

Figma announced 20 new MCP partners at its first Config conference in India — hours after co-founder and CEO Dylan Field told reporters the protocol is not good enough to fully open the company's data. The list includes Amp, ClickUp, Dia, Junie by JetBrains, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode, and Sarvam Agents. MCP (model context protocol) is an open standard that defines how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools.

The tension matters beyond Figma. MCP is becoming the default plumbing for agent ecosystems across the industry, and one of the largest design platforms is now publicly saying the standard itself is structurally skewed — even while adopting it. That contradiction shapes how much data toolmakers will expose, and how safely.

What did Dylan Field actually say?

At a media briefing, Field drew a line between Figma's willingness to open its ecosystem and his assessment of the protocol itself.

"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," Field said. "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."

The claim of advantage is the sharpest part. Field did not specify which frontier labs benefit or how, and the source offers no supporting evidence — the assertion stands as his characterization, not a documented finding. Still, it frames a real question about who sets the terms of data access in agent ecosystems.

The takeaway: Figma will support MCP, but its CEO believes the protocol's design tilts toward the largest AI labs.

Why is Figma holding back data?

Field said the company's caution is about abuse, not ideology. The more data Figma exposes through MCP, the higher the chance of malicious use, he explained. Most users have no bad intent, he acknowledged, but the company still has to weigh those potential risks.

That is a caveat attached to every promise of openness Figma makes here. The 20 new partners represent expansion, not a fully open firehose of design data — and Field's comments suggest the gap will persist until the abuse surface shrinks.

The takeaway: openness at Figma is conditional on risk, and the conditions are set by Figma alone.

What sparked the public spat with Anthropic?

Days before the India announcement, one of MCP's co-creators publicly complained that Figma did not support the open-source tool Pi. Field responded on X by pointing at Anthropic, the creator of the MCP standard, for not making its own resources available through it.

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

It is a pointed argument: the standard's own creator does not eat its cooking, in Field's telling. Anthropic's side of the exchange is not recorded in the source, so the asymmetry claim remains contested rather than settled. Field later added that Figma plans to support Pi.

The takeaway: the dispute is less about open versus closed than about who shares how much context, and on whose terms.

What happens next?

The 20 partnerships ship regardless of Field's reservations, and Pi support is on the roadmap. Whether Figma loosens its data restrictions will depend, by its CEO's own account, on how MCP's security and governance mature — areas the standard's critics and co-creators are still arguing about in public.