Figma's Dylan Field Calls MCP 'Not a Perfect Protocol' — Yet Expands Support With 20 New Partners

Figma co-founder Dylan Field has doubled down on his reservations about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open source standard that governs how AI agents connect to external data sources and tools — even as his company moves to broaden its support for it.

Figma Adds 20 New MCP Partners

At Figma's first Config conference in India, the design platform announced 20 new MCP partners, including Amp, ClickUp, Dia, Junie by JetBrains, Linear, Meta Muse, Mistral, Notion, OpenCode, and Sarvam Agents. The expansion signals Figma's intent to position itself at the center of the emerging agentic AI ecosystem.

A Longstanding Critique

Field's skepticism is not new. Days before the partner announcement, one of MCP's co-creators publicly complained that Figma did not support the open source tool Pi. In his response, Field turned the critique back on Anthropic, the creator of MCP.

"I find it interesting that Anthropic (creators of MCP standard) do not expose artifacts / other cloud resources created via MCP," he wrote on X. "The debate is framed as open vs closed. Everyone always prefers open… obviously. And meanwhile issues of asymmetric context sharing are ignored."

Field later clarified that Figma plans to support Pi.

'Not a Perfect Protocol'

Speaking at a media briefing, Field elaborated on the debate. While Figma wants to be open, he argued, MCP itself has significant shortcomings.

"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. "It is advantaged more to frontier labs. Also, I understand everyone online who just wants a protocol that they can use when they want to use their Figma data, and I want them to use it, too."

The Abuse Risk Tradeoff

Field also explained why Figma has held back from going fully open: the more data the company exposes through MCP, the greater the potential for abuse. While most users have no malicious intent when accessing MCP or Figma data, he said, the company still has to account for those risks.

The position reflects a broader tension in 2026's agentic AI landscape, where interoperability standards like MCP have become critical infrastructure — but where platform companies remain wary of ceding control over how their data is accessed at scale.

via TechCrunch AI