Figma Co-founder Dylan Field Says MCP Favors Frontier Labs

Figma announced 20 new MCP partners at its first Config conference held in India, including Amp, ClickUp, Linear, Notion, Mistral, and others. At a media briefing, co-founder Dylan Field told reporters that he does not think MCP is a perfect protocol.

Field's core argument points to a structural asymmetry: MCP was created by Anthropic, yet Anthropic itself does not expose its cloud resources through MCP. Field wrote on X that he found it interesting that the creators of the MCP standard do not expose artifacts or other cloud resources created via MCP. He argued that the debate is framed as open versus closed, everyone always prefers open, and meanwhile issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored.

The mechanism behind this argument is as follows: MCP standardizes how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools. When application-layer companies open their data according to this standard, the protocol creator—typically a frontier lab with the most powerful models—gains a structured access path without offering reciprocal exposure. Field further stated at the media briefing that MCP is advantaged more to frontier labs.

Figma's actual strategy is to both embrace and critique the standard. The company is expanding MCP support, but Field said the reason Figma does not want to be fully open is that the more data the company exposes through MCP, the higher the chance of abuse. He acknowledged that most users do not intend to use MCP or Figma data maliciously, but the company still has to think about those potential risks. Field later added that Figma plans to support Pi, the open-source tool that one of MCP's co-creators had complained about.