Canva Launches Craft, Its First In-House Image Model, and Opens It to Developers

Sydney design platform Canva has released Craft, the first image generation model built and trained from scratch by its in-house AI lab, Canva Research. The model is available to all Canva users globally through the Dream Lab panel and to developers through Canva's public API, with access through the Canva MCP Server listed as coming soon, according to the company's announcement and coverage by SmartCompany.

Canva says Craft debuted as the fourth-ranked image model on DesignArena, a crowdsourced leaderboard for AI design, and ranks first globally in its People and Portraits and Landscapes and Nature categories. It produces images at up to 2K resolution in more than 30 aspect ratios and can render text in 55 languages. Unlike models that turn a prompt straight into pixels, Craft works in two stages: a planning model writes out the composition, including where elements sit and any text that must appear, and a separate rendering model then draws the image.

The training data leans on design rather than photography. Canva says it used millions of human-made templates from its own library, from posters and menus to presentations, then refined the model with feedback from its professional designers, who assessed more than 25,000 pairs of images against rival models. Faster and cheaper variants, Craft-fast and Craft-ultrafast, are in development.

What it means in practice

Owning a model reduces Canva's reliance on outside providers for one of its most-used features and gives it something new to sell. SmartCompany notes that the public API lets Canva offer the model to other brands, from marketing platforms to e-commerce and print services. It is a notable step for an Australian company in a field dominated by US and Chinese labs, and it lands while the country argues over how AI should be trained on creative work, with Canberra weighing an opt-out copyright deal for AI training and creatives facing off with AI companies at the Sydney inquiry.

The launch material does not say how template contributors are credited or paid when their work shapes a commercial model, a question likely to come up as Canva sells access more widely. Canva says Craft is covered by Canva Shield, its programme of input and output moderation, privacy controls and reporting tools.

What to watch: pricing for API customers, when MCP access goes live, and whether the faster variants keep image quality while cutting cost.