Anthropic CPO leaves Figma’s board after reports he will offer a competing product

The board exit is less about one executive's conflict of interest and more about a structural incompatibility that was always latent: AI labs sitting on the boards of companies they now have the capability and incentive to undercut. Figma is simply the first high-profile case where that tension became untenable.

Anthropic launched Claude Design just one day before this story broke (per our coverage of 'Anthropic launches Claude Design'), which means the competitive threat to Figma wasn't hypothetical — it was already shipping. That timing makes the board resignation look less like a precautionary move and more like a cleanup after the fact. Zooming out, Anthropic is simultaneously expanding its London headcount toward 800-plus employees and navigating a thawing relationship with the Trump administration, both of which suggest a company accelerating into product markets rather than pulling back. The pattern mirrors what we noted in the OpenAI competitive memo from Stratechery: frontier labs are now actively targeting the B2B software layer, not just selling API access into it.

Watch whether other AI lab executives holding board seats at SaaS companies (design, productivity, or otherwise) face similar pressure to resign within the next 60 days. A second forced exit would confirm this is a sector-wide governance problem, not an isolated conflict.