Figma co-founder Dylan Field says MCP is not a perfect protocol
Figma co-founder Dylan Field believes the MCP protocol has plenty of room for improvement, even as the design platform expands its support and announces 20 new partners.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of design software company Figma, has said that MCP (model context protocol) is not a perfect protocol. MCP is an open source standard that defines how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools. Despite these reservations, Figma is expanding its support for it. At the company's first Config conference, held in India, Figma announced 20 new MCP partners, including Amp, ClickUp, Dia, JetBrains' Junie, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode and Sarvam Agents.
The openness debate
Field has voiced misgivings about MCP before. A few days before the announcement, one of MCP's co-creators criticized Figma for not supporting the open source tool Pi. In his reply on X, Field noted that Anthropic, the creator of the MCP standard, does not expose its artifacts and other cloud resources through MCP. He said the debate is framed as open versus closed, while issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored. He later added that Figma plans to support Pi.
Field's explanation
At a media briefing, Field said he is excited about opening up Figma's ecosystem, but that MCP has plenty of room for improvement and favors frontier AI labs. He added that he understands users who simply want a protocol for working with their Figma data, and that he wants them to use it.
According to him, Figma does not want to be fully open because the more data the company exposes through MCP, the greater the chance of abuse. Field clarified that most users do not intend to use MCP or Figma data maliciously, but the company still has to consider those potential risks.
