What is Claude Design? Anthropic's new AI tool that tanked Adobe and Figma stocks

After triggering a selloff in stocks of SaaS companies earlier this year with Claude Code, Anthropic has a new AI tool that is now threatening the shares of software design companies like Adobe and Figma. The Dario Amodei-led startup has unveiled a new AI tool called Claude Design, which the company says can create polished visual assets ranging from interactive prototypes to pitch decks, all with a simple text prompt.

The launch sent shockwaves through the design software market, with Adobe shares dropping roughly 1.5% and Figma seeing a 7% decline in secondary markets following the news. The market reaction comes just days after Anthropic's Chief Product Officer resigned from Figma’s board on April 14.

What is Claude Design?

Claude Design is powered by Anthropic's latest Claude Opus 4.7 model and is aimed at helping experienced designers and non-designers produce and explore visual work. In order to start a new project with Claude Design, users only need to upload an image or a document like DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX, or even just point Claude directly at an existing codebase.

Anthropic says Claude Design builds a first draft of the requested design, and then users can refine it via inline comments, direct edits, or custom sliders until they get it right. The tool is also capable of applying a team's design system to every project automatically in order to make sure that the created design is consistent with the rest of the company's designs.

"During onboarding, Claude builds a design system for your team by reading your codebase and design files," Anthropic explained in its blog post. "Every project after that uses your colours, typography, and components automatically".

Anthropic also shared a few realistic ways in which its new Claude Design tool is already being used by teams:

Realistic prototypes: Turning static mockups into shareable, interactive prototypes for user testing without requiring code review.

Pitch decks: Allowing founders to go from a rough outline to a complete, on-brand presentation in minutes.

Frontier design: Building complex, code-powered prototypes that incorporate voice, video, 3D elements, and shaders.

Marketing collateral: Marketers can use Claude Design to create landing pages, social media assets, and campaign visuals and then bring in designers to add extra polish.

How to use Claude Design:

• Open the Claude app or website.
• Create a project and add any relevant context like DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, or a screenshot.
• Review what Claude generates on the canvas.
• Iterate using chat messages and inline comments.

When a project is finished, users can export the designs to Canva, PDF, PPTX, or standalone HTML files. The new tool also features a seamless handoff to Anthropic's coding assistant, Claude Code.

"When a design is ready to build, Claude packages everything into a handoff bundle that you can pass to Claude Code with a single instruction," the company noted.

Who can use Claude Design?

Claude Design is available at no extra cost for existing Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. However, it does draw from a user's subscription limits. Anthropic says users have the option to enable "extra usage" to continue beyond those limits.

For enterprise users, the feature is turned off by default and must be enabled by an administrator.