Anthropic launches Claude Design to speed up graphic design projects

The latest addition to Anthropic PBC’s product portfolio is Claude Design, a tool that enables users to generate visual assets with prompts.

The company launched the offering into public preview today. It’s available to Claude users with Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise subscriptions.

The first component of the Claude Design interface is a “Let’s prototype” sidebar. It contains a chat box that allows users to describe the visual asset they wish to create in natural language. There are also other ways to launch a project. According to Anthropic, customers can upload reference images such a sketch of what they wish to draw.

Claude Design also supports document uploads. A marketer could upload a PDF file that describes a new smart home appliance and ask Claude Design to create a banner ad for the product.

The prototype design that is generated in response to the user’s initial prompt appears on a virtual canvas at the center of the Claude Design interface. Customers can make refinements by clicking a “Tweaks” button. It brings up a chat box into which designers can type edit requests.

Customers can use the Tweaks feature by selecting a component of a visual asset and asking Claude Design to change it. It can also be used to generate custom graphic design controls. For example, Claude Design could generate a tooltip that makes it possible to manually adjust the size and font of ad text.

The new service can generate a wide range of visual assets. In one internal demo, Anthropic staffers used it to create a three-dimensional, interactive globe with appearance customization controls. It also lends itself to creating simpler assets such as slides and ads.

The tool supports so-called design systems. Those are guidelines that describe how an organization’s employees should create customer-facing visual assets. When Claude Design is given access to a design system, it can automatically apply the guidelines to user projects. Developers, meanwhile, can give the tool access to an application’s code repository and ask it to generate an interface for the program.

Once a visual asset is ready, users can generate a sharable link that allows colleagues to view it. It’s also possible to export visual assets in several file formats.

Under the hood, Claude Design is powered by Anthropic’s latest Claude Opus 4.7 large language model introduced yesterday. The company says the algorithm is significantly better than its predecessor at graphic design tasks. It’s also more adept at image analysis, which means that it can more accurately interpret the reference images that users upload at the start of a Claude Design project.

The new tool was developed by a team called Anthropic Labs that the company expanded at the start of the year. The reorganization saw Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who was until recently the AI provider’s chief product officer, join the unit as its co-lead. The team expansion hints that Anthropic plans to follow up Claude Design with additional task-specific artificial intelligence products.

The announcement of the tool sent shares of design software maker Figma Inc. tumbling more than 7%. The company’s flagship product is a platform that enables designers to create visual assets with Google Docs-like real-time collaboration features. Over the years, Figma has released more specialized tools focused on tasks such as creating presentations and websites. Anthropic could potentially take a similar approach with future additions to its AI-powered design feature set.

Image: Anthropic