Adobe floods Photoshop and Premiere with AI, opens up an MCP

Adobe used its MAX event in Miami to shove AI deeper into Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and InDesign. It also expanded the creative AI agent inside Firefly and shipped a local Model Context Protocol, which exposes Creative Cloud features to chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Adobe already had ChatGPT and Claude integrations — the MCP widens what those assistants can actually reach.

Firefly is stepping onto Figma's turf with Builder, a prototyping tool in private beta that lets users mock up designs to pitch ideas. Adobe also added a tool for creating on-brand graphs and an image editor that changes one part of a picture without disturbing the rest. A new AI video feature in Firefly stitches clips, images and sound effects into a finished cut.

The agent is going proactive and always-on, so it gathers more context about the work and stays ready to act. Quick jobs get shortcuts — pulling a background or generating a thumbnail for a video. Photoshop picks up a relighting feature and sliders for prompt-based generative styles; Premiere gets a professional color grading system and object removal for video; Lightroom can now fix blinking eyes and wipe away blemishes.

Adobe's shelves are already stocked with third-party models from Google, Runway, ElevenLabs, Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, Kling and ByteDance. Topaz Labs, one of Adobe's newer acquisitions, is rolling out two image models: Wonder 4 for upscaling and denoising, and ImageHDR, which turns standard images into HDR.

Adobe VP Deepa Subramaniam told TechCrunch the company is still deciding what to open up. “We are still figuring out where and when and how to draw the line,” she said, citing endpoints across Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere. She said Adobe has “no need or desire” to limit what the MCP endpoint exposes, and will watch how people use it before shipping more.

Not everyone is sold on MCP. Last month, Figma co-founder Dylan Field said at an event in India that the standard isn't perfect and that it benefits frontier labs more.