Anthropic Launches Claude Design, Challenging Lovable and Figma

Things are moving at a breakneck pace: Anthropic has, as the rumor mill predicted, launched a new product called Claude Design that directly enters the market for AI-powered design and prototyping tools. The tool targets designers, product managers, founders, and marketers alike, putting it in direct competition with platforms such as Lovable, which had until now been leading in this niche. Lovable’s response was not long in coming.

It had previously become known that Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, had stepped down from Figma’s board because the company is working on a competing product. That it is Claude Design is now clear.

What Claude Design can do

Claude Design is a collaborative design tool based on Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic’s most powerful vision model. Users can create visual projects through simple text descriptions and then refine them through conversation, inline comments, or direct edits. The tool is currently available as a Research Preview for subscribers on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.

Its core features include:

• Automatic brand consistency: During onboarding, Claude reads existing codebases and design files and uses them to create a design system with colors, typography, and components that is automatically applied to all projects.
• Flexible import options: In addition to text prompts, images, documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), and entire codebases can serve as starting points. A web capture tool makes it possible to pull elements directly from existing websites.
• Interactive prototypes: Designers can convert static mockups into shareable, interactive prototypes without having to go through code reviews or pull requests.
• Presentations and pitch decks: Rough outlines become complete, brand-compliant decks that can be exported as PPTX or transferred directly to Canva.
• Direct handoff to Claude Code: Finished designs can be passed to Claude Code as a handoff bundle and converted into code with a single command.
• Team collaboration: Designs can be shared, commented on, and edited collaboratively across an organization, including group chat with Claude.

The tool thus addresses a classic bottleneck in the design process: even experienced designers can rarely prototype more than a few directions simultaneously due to time constraints. Claude Design is intended to remove this limitation.

A direct attack on Lovable and similar platforms

Lovable has established itself in recent years as one of the leading platforms for AI-powered app and interface design. With Claude Design, the provider of the underlying AI model itself is now entering the market and offering many features that had until now been the unique selling point of third-party tools. In particular, the combination of design system integration, interactive prototypes, team collaboration, and direct code handoff makes Claude Design a serious competitor to Lovable, Figma, and other platforms.

For users who are already Claude subscribers, Claude Design eliminates the need to pay for a separate tool like Lovable. Access is included in the existing subscription, with only the option to purchase additional usage quotas if needed.

Lovable’s response: Double credits as a customer retention measure

Lovable responded immediately to the launch. The company announced that, following the integration of Claude Opus 4.7 into its own platform, users will receive double the credits for their actions for a limited time. The offer applies automatically and expires on April 30, 2026, after which credits will revert to normal calculation.

“Opus 4.7 just dropped in Lovable, and for a limited time your credits will go up to 2x further.”

The measure is best understood as a classic customer retention strategy: users are meant to be incentivized by a short-term added value to stay on the platform rather than switching to Claude Design. At the same time, Lovable is signaling that it is betting on the most powerful available model in order to remain competitive.

The structural dilemma: Lovable is dependent on Anthropic

Lovable’s and Figma’s responses, however, reveal a fundamental strategic problem. By integrating Claude as their central model and even actively promoting it, these companies are making themselves directly dependent on Anthropic — the very company that is now entering the market as a direct competitor with Claude Design.

This dependency is structural in nature. Lovable, for example, cannot control the quality of the underlying model itself, cannot improve it independently, and is reliant on Anthropic’s availability and pricing. Should Anthropic change its API terms or further expand Claude Design, Lovable has little room to push back. The coding tool Cursor, for instance, has attempted to become more independent of Anthropic by using open source from China — in that case, Kimi K2.5 — and tailoring it for its own purposes.