On Tuesday 14 April, Mike Krieger resigned from Figma's board. He co-founded Instagram, he is Anthropic's chief product officer, and he had joined the Figma board less than a year earlier. The same day, The Information reported that Anthropic's Opus 4.7 model would include design tools. By the weekend, TechCrunch was reporting that Anthropic had launched Claude Design, which lets someone describe a visual and get back prototypes, slides and one-pagers, exportable as PDFs, URLs or PPTX files, or sent on to Canva.
The scene is small: a board seat vacated, a conflict declared. What it shows is how fast a supplier can turn into a competitor. Figma's board had a man on it whose employer was about to ship a rival product. Our reading is that this is AI labs competing with software companies they once partnered with, with design tools among the first. It is a tidy illustration of an old rule: whoever supplies the engine eventually wants the car.
Meta offers the same lesson at larger scale. Emarketer forecasts that Meta will overtake Google in digital ad revenue this year for the first time, and credits automation more than reach. Facebook and Instagram, Reels included, have improved ad performance through increased automation. Amazon sits third, expected to take 9% of global ad revenue, rising from $68.64 billion in 2025 to $82.07 billion in 2026. Google has had the biggest inventory for years. The forecast suggests that being the best at the machinery behind the inventory can matter more.
Netflix seems to be playing a version of the same game. It now works with more than 4,000 advertising clients, up 70 per cent year-on-year, and its advertising revenue is on track to reach three billion dollars this year, double last year's figure. A company that began as a place to watch things has grown good at the less glamorous business of selling the space around them. Adweek's numbers describe a firm building its own selling machine rather than renting one.
Luxury, meanwhile, spent the week showing what happens to houses that rely on the old arrangement of making a beautiful object and trusting the market to do the rest. LVMH, Kering and Hermès all posted underwhelming first-quarter revenues. LVMH named the war in Iran as a material factor. Gucci's sales fell 8 per cent again as Kering reorganised key functions under its new CEO. Luca Solca compared Hermès, long held up as the model of luxury discipline, to Louis Vuitton's 'Capucine moment' in the early 2010s, when product fatigue set in and growth stalled. Business of Fashion's reading was that craft and scarcity alone may not be enough.
Separately, other houses made moves around the means of making and showing. Rolex unveiled Jubilee gold at Watches & Wonders in Geneva, an alloy developed and produced in-house, on the Oyster Perpetual Day-Date 40mm. Monocle reported fashion houses building a lasting presence at Fuorisalone in Milan, several with their own spaces rather than one-off collaborations. Prada put Theaster Gates's Chawan Cabinet, with limited-edition ceramics by four Japanese artists, into its new Via Montenapoleone space. Susie Cave, who closed The Vampire's Wife two years ago, is bringing it back in Kensington as an appointment-only demi-couture venture.
There is a line running from Krieger's resignation to those rooms. Anthropic is taking the design tool itself rather than staying a partner to the people who sell design tools. Rolex makes its own gold. Prada shows the cabinet in its own new space. Cave controls the appointment. In each case the party in question seems to have stopped renting a position inside someone else's system and moved to hold the part that produces the work. It may be a defensive instinct as much as an ambitious one, and it would explain why the week's boardroom news and its design-week news read so alike.
The cautionary tale is Allbirds, which announced a deal to rebrand as NewBird AI, abandoning footwear for data centres and computing power. Its stock rose 580 per cent on a deal valued at fifty million dollars. That looks like the reverse case: a brand that gave up what it made in order to be near what someone else was building. The market applauded, which says something about the mood, though not necessarily anything good about the plan.
Figma's empty board seat tells the story in miniature. Mike Krieger had co-founded Instagram and sat at that table for less than a year, and he resigned on 14 April, the same day The Information reported that Opus 4.7 would carry design tools. Days later Claude Design could turn a sentence into slides and send them on to Canva.