Figma has just added 20 partners to a protocol its own co-founder says is not perfect. At the company's first Config conference in India, Figma announced the new model context protocol (MCP) partners, while Dylan Field told reporters that MCP has "tons of room for improvement." Expanding support for a standard you openly doubt is an unusual position, but a defensible one.
What Figma actually announced
MCP is an open source standard that defines how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools. Figma is widening its support for it, and the new partner list is a mix of coding agents, productivity apps and model makers.
The names the company listed:
- Coding and agent tools: Amp, Junie by JetBrains and OpenCode
- Work and planning apps: ClickUp, Linear and Notion
- Browsers, models and agents: Dia, Meta Muse, Mistral and Sarvam Agents
That is ten names, and the full roster is twenty. The report only spells out the ten above.
The argument that preceded it
The announcement did not arrive in a calm news cycle. One of MCP's co-creators had complained publicly that Figma did not support the open source tool Pi. Field answered on X, and he did not simply say "fair point."
He turned the question around and asked why Anthropic, the creator of the MCP standard, does not expose its artifacts and other cloud resources through MCP. His post is dated September 30, 2026. In it he said the debate tends to be framed as open versus closed, that everyone prefers open "obviously," and that meanwhile "issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored."
It was a polite way of saying that openness is easier to demand from other people's products. Field added that he was perhaps missing something, a hedge that fooled nobody but kept the tone civil.
He later added that Figma plans to support Pi. So the original complaint is, on the stated plan at least, being addressed.
What Field said in person
At a media briefing, Field was asked about the exchange. His answer was candid, and it came in three parts.
He is for opening up. He said he is excited about what Figma is doing to open its ecosystem, and that he wants people who simply need a protocol for their Figma data to use it.
He is not sold on the protocol. In his words, MCP is not a perfect protocol and has a lot of room to improve. He also said it is "advantaged more to frontier labs," which echoes his earlier point about asymmetric context sharing. In plain terms, the biggest AI labs get more out of the standard than the companies whose data flows through it.
He has a reason to hold back. Figma does not want to be fully open, he said, because the more data it exposes through MCP, the higher the chance of abuse. He added that most users do not intend to misuse MCP or Figma data, but the company still has to plan for the ones who might.
The trade-off underneath
There is a tension here that neither side can wish away. Open standards are popular because they reduce friction. Friction, however, is also what keeps a lot of bad behavior in check. Every extra door a design platform opens for agents is a door someone can misuse.
Field's position is a calibrated one. Support the standard, add partners, promise Pi, and keep a hand on how much data actually goes through. Critics will call that selective openness. Field would presumably call it risk management. Both descriptions can be true at once.
The point about Anthropic is a fair jab too, if a convenient one. A protocol created by a frontier lab that does not expose its own cloud resources through that protocol invites exactly the question Field asked. The report does not include an answer from Anthropic.
What to watch
- Pi support: Field said Figma plans it, but gave no date in the report.
- How much data flows: the company has said it will limit exposure, but has not said how.
- The frontier-lab question: whether the protocol evolves to address the imbalance Field described.
For now, Figma has chosen the awkward but honest route of joining a standard while publicly listing its flaws. In a field where every integration announcement is described as a milestone, that is almost refreshing.