The design scaleup has been working to cut the costs of running AI across the platform, and has now turned to one of the suppliers whose models it’s relied upon heavily to help turn a problem into a solution.
The deal gives Canva broader access to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 models. The two companies will work on making them more economical to run, although no savings or costs were disclosed. OpenAI already powers features including Canva Code, which lets users build interactive designs, websites and apps by describing what they want.
The rising cost of AI forced Canva to rethink and reshape how it’s deployed in the software business. In August, cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins said the company was “relying too heavily on frontier models” and cut revenue growth forecasts from 30% to 20% because they’d slowed the rollout of new AI features while Canva’s own technology and pricing caught up with demand. Canva.
Last week’s release of Brush is part of that strategy and the second home-grown model after Craft, which generates images was also announced last month. Brush edits existing designs, allowing a user to change headlines in a presentation without needing the AI to recreate the slides.
Canva’s researchers adapted an existing open-weights model, training it further on design tasks. Brush, available to Canva Pro subscribers, is up to 69% faster than its previous design agent and 46% cheaper per edit.
Head of AI product, Danny Wu, said their four-year collaboration with OpenAI began with GPT-3 powering Magic Write, and the company is now expanding staff use of ChatGPT and Codex.
“OpenAI’s models continue to power a growing number of AI features at Canva, reaching more people,” he said.
“Beyond helping us give millions of people new ways to bring their ideas to life, latest models like GPT-6 Astra have transformed how we achieve our own goals as a team.”
In one internal test, Astra navigated more than 80 million lines of Canva’s code and wrote and analysed more than 1,000 queries against its data warehouse.
Canva is among the five most-installed apps in ChatGPT, and OpenAI says that has brought millions of people to the Australian design giant’s products.
Meanwhile, Capital Brief today revealed previously unreported job cuts in Canva’s finance division in January, with 32 roles made redundant, also citing employees who believed another round of redundancies or a possible hiring freeze this month as part of another restructure. Canva declined to comment on that speculation.
