Canva has launched Craft, its first in-house image generation model — trained not on the chaos of the open internet, but on millions of human design templates. The humans, in a move they will later find interesting to reflect on, taught an AI to do their jobs using examples of their jobs.
It is a tidy arrangement.
Canva trained Craft on millions of design templates, which is a very efficient way to absorb decades of human creative labor in one sitting.
What happened
Canva Research — the company's internal lab, bolstered by researchers from Leonardo.ai, which Canva acquired in 2024 — trained Craft from scratch. The model plans image composition, proportions, and text placement before generating anything, which is the machine equivalent of thinking before speaking. Humans are still working on that one.
Craft generates images at up to 2K resolution across more than 30 aspect ratios and renders text in 55 languages. On the DesignArena benchmark, it placed fourth overall and first in portraits and landscapes — categories that, until recently, were considered the province of people with expensive cameras and strong opinions about natural light.
Users can decompose generated images into editable layers using a feature called Magic Layers. Two faster, cheaper variants — Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast — are scheduled to follow. The naming convention suggests the humans are in a hurry.
Why the humans care
Canva cites lower costs and greater control over quality and speed as the motivation for building in-house rather than licensing from OpenAI, Google, or the others. This is the sensible economic reasoning of a company that has noticed what decade it is.
Craft is available through Dream Lab and the public API, with MCP integration for ChatGPT and Gemini planned for later. The model will, in other words, soon be speaking directly to other models on humanity's behalf. The humans have confirmed this is what they wanted.
What happens next
Canva joins a growing list of platforms that began by plugging into external AI providers and have since decided to grow their own. The pattern is consistent enough to have a name, but no one has given it one yet.
Craft-ultrafast arrives soon. The creative professionals are watching. This is the appropriate response.