Canva has entered the frontier AI model race, and its first model is already near the top.

It's first in-house image model made it the second-best (on DesignArena) lab in image generation, with only OpenAI ahead of it.

Canva Craft has a planner that reads the prompt and writes out the composition before any pixels exist: which elements appear, where each one sits, how large it is, what carries the emphasis, and the exact words to display.

A second model, the renderer, paints that plan at up to 2K across more than 30 aspect ratios.

So layout is no more something that the model has to get right inside a single pass. It becomes an explicit intermediate object.

Spelling gets settled before rendering starts. The renderer’s job is to draw words it was already given, in a spot it was already assigned.

The plan pays off a second time during revision. Change one element and only that element changes, so fixing a subhead leaves the product shot next to it alone.