Adobe Pushes AI Agents and MCP Into Photoshop, Premiere, Firefly

Adobe has released a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) that exposes Creative Cloud application features to external chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the company announced at its MAX event in Miami. The protocol release accompanied a broad set of AI feature additions across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, Express, and Firefly.

The MCP launch is the most strategically significant item in the announcement. MCP (an open protocol that lets AI assistants call external software functions) already underpins Adobe's existing ChatGPT and Claude integrations, which give users limited access to product functions. The new local implementation exposes a wider set of endpoints.

What does the MCP actually expose?

Adobe vice president Deepa Subramaniam told TechCrunch that the endpoint set covers Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. She said the scope remains deliberately open-ended.

"We are still figuring out where and when and how to draw the line. What we're putting out there is a number of endpoints and capabilities across Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. We're just going to see how people use it, what they're trying to do, and keep showing more," Subramaniam said.

She added that Adobe has no intention of constraining the protocol's reach. "We don't have any need or desire to sort of limit what the MCP endpoint can expose. What we really want to do is to support that creative workflow, how you choose to do it," she said.

The company will rely on user feedback to determine which additional capabilities to expose. The release positions Adobe against criticism leveled at MCP itself: last month, Figma co-founder Dylan Field said at an event in India that MCP is not a perfect standard and benefits frontier AI labs more than tool vendors.

What is new in Firefly?

Firefly, Adobe's generative creative application, received the largest share of the announcement. A new prototyping tool called Builder enters private beta. Builder lets users create designs that demonstrate ideas, a capability that moves Firefly into direct competition with Figma's design prototyping market.

Firefly also gains three additional capabilities:

• A tool for creating on-brand graphs
• An image editing tool that changes part of an image without altering other objects
• An AI-powered video tool that assembles video from clips, images, and sound effects

Adobe is also changing how its agent operates. The agent becomes proactive and always on, allowing it to gather more context about ongoing work and remain available for any action. Quick-action features, such as background removal or video thumbnail generation, get simplified access paths.

What ships for Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom?

The MAX event continues a pattern of AI feature additions Adobe has already shipped across Photoshop, Express, Premiere, and Illustrator. This round adds:

• Photoshop: a relighting feature and sliders for prompt-based generative styles
• Premiere: a new color grading system aimed at professionals and an object removal feature for video
• Lightroom: blinking-eye correction and a blemish removal tool

Illustrator and InDesign are included in the broader announcement, though Adobe did not itemize new capabilities for them separately.

Which third-party models are involved?

Adobe already distributes third-party AI models from Google, Runway, ElevenLabs, Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, Kling, and ByteDance. Its recent acquisition Topaz Labs contributed two new image models to the lineup: Wonder 4, which handles upscaling and denoising, and ImageHDR, which converts standard images to HDR.

Why does the agent shift matter?

The always-on agent design marks a change from tool-invoked AI features to persistent assistant behavior inside creative workflows. Adobe frames the change as workflow support rather than automation replacement, per Subramaniam's comments on following user behavior rather than dictating usage patterns.

For creative operations teams, the practical consequences are threefold: Firefly Builder enters a prototyping segment where Figma holds established position; the MCP release makes Adobe application functions callable from enterprise AI assistants that enterprises already deploy; and the model catalog expansion adds processing options for upscaling, HDR conversion, audio, and video generation without leaving Adobe's subscription estate.

Adobe did not announce pricing changes, release dates beyond Builder's private beta status, or general-availability timelines for the MCP endpoints. Subramaniam's statements indicate the exposed capability set will expand based on observed usage rather than a fixed roadmap.