Figma co-founder says MCP is not a perfect protocol, yet the company expands support for it

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of design software company Figma, acknowledges that the model context protocol (MCP) is not perfect, even as his company expands its support for it. MCP is an open source standard that defines how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools. At Figma's first Config conference, held in India, the company announced 20 new MCP partners.

New partners

The partners include Amp, ClickUp, Dia, JetBrains' Junie, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode and Sarvam Agents.

A debate over openness

Field has voiced reservations 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, which created the MCP standard, does not expose its artifacts and other cloud resources through the protocol. He said the debate is framed as open versus closed, while the issue of asymmetric context sharing is ignored. He later added that Figma plans to support Pi.

At a media briefing, Field explained that Figma wants to be open, but he sees MCP as a protocol with plenty of room for improvement. In his view, it favors frontier AI labs. He also said he understands users who simply want a protocol for working with their Figma data, and that he wants them to use it.

Security considerations

Field said the company does not want to be fully open because the more data it exposes through MCP, the greater the chance of abuse. He added that most users do not intend to use MCP or Figma data maliciously, but the company still has to weigh those potential risks.