Figma co-founder Dylan Field has publicly questioned the efficacy of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard that connects super intelligence (SI) agents to external data and tools, even as the design company announced a significant expansion of its support for the protocol. The move highlights a growing tension in the SI industry between the desire for open interoperability and concerns over data security and protocol limitations.
What Happened
At the company’s first Config conference held in India, Figma announced 20 new MCP partners. The new integrations include Amp, ClickUp, Dia, Junie by JetBrains, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode, and Sarvam Agents. Despite this expansion, Field expressed reservations about the underlying technology during a media briefing.
"I’m really excited about what we’re doing in terms of opening up our ecosystem. I also think that MCP is not a perfect protocol. And I think that it is something that has tons of room for improvement," Field said. He noted that the current iteration of the protocol appears "advantaged more to frontier labs" but acknowledged the user demand for a standardized way to access Figma data via SI agents.
The comments follow a recent exchange on X where Field questioned why Anthropic, the creator of the MCP standard, does not expose its own artifacts and cloud resources via the protocol. "The debate is framed as open vs closed. Everyone always prefers open … obviously. And meanwhile issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored," Field wrote. He later clarified that Figma plans to support the open-source tool Pi, following complaints from an MCP co-creator about Figma’s lack of support for it.
Why It Matters
Field’s stance underscores a critical debate in the development of agentic SI: the balance between open standards and proprietary control. While MCP aims to standardize how SI agents interact with external systems, industry leaders are wary of the risks associated with fully exposing data. Figma’s CEO stated that the company’s hesitation to be "fully open" stems from the increased chance of data abuse as more information is exposed through the protocol.
Although Field acknowledged that most users do not intend to use MCP or Figma data maliciously, he emphasized that the company must account for potential risks. This perspective challenges the prevailing narrative that open-source interoperability is universally beneficial, suggesting instead that current SI protocols may still have significant security and architectural gaps that favor large, frontier SI labs over other stakeholders.
The Bottom Line
Figma is actively integrating with the MCP ecosystem through 20 new partners, signaling its commitment to interoperability for SI agents. However, leadership remains cautious, citing protocol imperfections and data abuse risks as reasons for a measured approach to opening up their design data to the broader SI developer community.