Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, resigned from Figma's board on April 14, the same day reports surfaced that Anthropic's next model would include design tools that could compete with Figma. [1] Sunday's paper said Figma had learned its AI partners can become product competitors. Monday's frame is sharper: this is now a board-governance story.

The facts do not require melodrama. Figma disclosed the resignation to the SEC. TechCrunch reported that the filing said it was not caused by any disagreement. [1] Krieger is not a random director. He is Anthropic's product chief, a former Instagram co-founder, and a director at a company whose product sits in the path of any AI design assistant.

That is enough. Governance exists for moments when everyone's incentives are plausible and conflicting. Anthropic can honestly want to build better design tools. Figma can honestly want frontier AI inside its workflow. A director can honestly understand both businesses. The problem is not dishonesty. The problem is proximity.

The divergence splits neatly. Mainstream coverage reports the resignation as a compact item beside the competitive-product context. X compresses it into the SaaSpocalypse: every software partner becomes a future predator once a model can do the workflow. The paper's answer is more prosaic. Boards need a new conflict vocabulary for AI partners.

The old software partnership model assumed complementarity. A platform integrated a model; the model improved the platform; both sold more. Claude Design challenges that comfort because the model vendor can move up the stack. If a model can produce prototypes, slides and one-pagers directly, Figma's partner can also become Figma's substitute for some customers. [2]

Figma's board did the structurally correct thing by removing the obvious conflict. That does not settle the larger question. It starts it. Every SaaS company using frontier labs as product partners now has to ask which board seats, data-sharing arrangements and roadmap conversations become conflicted the moment the lab ships higher in the stack.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco