AI company known for Stable Diffusion image generation model. Founded by Emad Mostaque, who resigned in March 2024 amid controversy. Faced multiple copyright lawsuits.
In early March 2024, Midjourney alleged that Stability AI employees infiltrated their database using paid accounts in a 'botnet activity' that caused a 24-hour outage. Midjourney claimed employees stole all prompt and image pairs. CEO Emad Mostaque denied involvement on X, but Midjourney banned all Stability AI employees 'indefinitely.' This incident occurred just before Mostaque's resignation.
Stability AI built its Stable Diffusion image generation model using the LAION dataset of 5 billion images scraped from the internet without creator consent or licensing. Visual artists filed a class action (Andersen v. Stability AI) in January 2023, and Getty Images sued in February 2023 over infringement of 12 million+ photographs. A leaked Midjourney spreadsheet cataloged 4,700+ artist names whose styles were specifically targeted. Trial is set for September 2026.