I only found out about Figma's limitation when I was trying to add the remote MCP server to GitHub Copilot Desktop and kept running into errors. Turns out they whitelisted GitHub Copilot CLI but not the Desktop app and had put a pause on enabling any more vendors. Eventually someone (not sure which side) got it working.

Kind of strange to limit edit access only to the Remote MCP when their competitors like Pen[1] and Paper[2] allow any local agent to edit.

[1] https://www.pen.dev/

[2] https://paper.design/

> on the figma mcp, we've had an email thread going on for 8 months trying to get it setup in opencode

> they seem very concerned with the labs competing with them

> finally got unblocked after i sent this email and it'll be rolled out in a week or so

The email:

> looking through the legal stuff the amount of things in there seems pretty crazy

> this is just an mcp server, there are thousands of them. we're not going to treat figma like its special

> we've been talking about this for this entire year, i don't think this makes much sense and i don't want my team burning more time on this

> once again, for a simple mcp server

— https://www.threads.com/@thdxr/post/Dd7LN-ylLQW

It did an amazing job.

The security problem is two fold: (1) companies want control over where their data goes. Figma allowing any MCP creates problems (2) open redirects can create phishing issues. If your using Pi, you’re probably thinking of this. Most users aren’t.

For us, we decided to do an allowlist pattern because it was a reasonable tradeoff. The solution is allowing per-tenant client configuration, but that comes with its own set of issues (dev time, support, maintenance, etc). When nearly all of the money is flowing through a handful of well-known MCPs there’s little reason to out effort into supporting every MCP.