Figma Faces Lawsuit over AI Data Use

Figma has been sued over this allegation of using customer information without their consent to train AI models, which is a very major issue of data privacy.

Design platform Figma is also undergoing legal scrutiny following a potential class action in the California federal court purporting that the company has been utilizing customer content improperly to train its AI models. The case alleges that Figma was utilizing customer designs and intellectual property assets unlicensed and lifting its valuation before its IPO of up to 1.2 billion dollars.

Figma has refuted the claims and stated that it only uses customer data to train AI with direct consent, ensuring all approved data is de-identified to safeguard privacy. Plaintiffs hold that companies should protect sensitive creative work from secret usage in the AI training.

The case becomes part of an increasing trend of claims filed against tech companies over the unlicensed use of data in the creation of generative AI. This complaint is unlike numerous others concerning the copyright-based litigation, as it involves the purported theft of trade secrets and access to unauthorized data.

Image generation, layout recommendations, and code generation are some of the tasks that can be automated by Figma, a software that now has Alphabet and Microsoft and Netflix among its clients, yet its generative AI functions have grown at an unprecedented rate of expansion in recent years. It was claimed that the lawsuit states that users were enrolled into data use to generate training without their knowledge, which went against what Figma had promised to do.

The lawsuit filed by the plaintiffs seeks both money and a court order to stop the use of AI models made by the company using stolen information, adding to the many legal battles in the rapidly evolving AI industry.