Organisation · company · UK

Stability AI

The company behind Stable Diffusion, the first capable image generator released with openly downloadable weights, and a standard-bearer for the open-weights camp in generative media.

15 entries · August 2022 – January 2026

Stability AI is a company, founded in 2019 and led for its first years by Emad Mostaque, that in 2022 released Stable Diffusion — the first capable image generator whose weights were published openly, free to download, modify and run on an ordinary graphics card. That made it the standard-bearer for the open-weights camp against closed labs such as OpenAI, and also the target of some of the earliest copyright suits over AI training data, most prominently from Getty Images. The open approach proved hard to fund: Mostaque resigned in March 2024 amid a cash crunch and the departure of core researchers, and the company has since ceased to occupy the central place it once held. In November 2025 the UK High Court largely rejected Getty's copyright case, ruling that a diffusion model's weights are not a "copy" of the training images, though Getty was later granted permission to appeal.

Category
Generative media
Founded
2019
HQ
London, UK
Funding
Raised at ~$1bn valuation (2022); restructured in 2024 under new leadership after Emad Mostaque's departure
Key people
Prem Akkaraju

Appears alongside

Featured in threads

Tracks

  • Courts & copyright 7
  • Models & capabilities 5
  • Open weights & ecosystem 5
  • Money & business 2
  • Labs & people 1

  1. UK court grants Getty permission to appeal Stability AI ruling

    Getty's appeal turns on whether Stable Diffusion is an 'infringing copy' under UK copyright law even though no training image is stored in its weights.

    Courts & copyright

  2. UK High Court largely rejects Getty's copyright claims against Stability AI

    The court held that Stable Diffusion's trained weights are not a 'copy' of Getty's photographs under UK law; Getty had already dropped its main copyright claim mid-trial.

    Courts & copyright

  3. Getty refiles its Stability AI suit in California after Delaware jurisdiction dispute

    Getty voluntarily dropped the Delaware case it had run since 2023 and filed a new, longer complaint in the Northern District of California, adding a copyright-dilution claim.

    Courts & copyright

  4. Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5

    Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion 3.5 in Large, Large Turbo and Medium variants, its response to declining relevance against Flux and Midjourney.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem

  5. Judge lets core copyright claims against Stability AI proceed in Andersen

    Judge William Orrick dismissed DMCA claims but allowed direct copyright-infringement and inducement claims against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt to proceed to discovery.

    Courts & copyright

  6. Stability AI ships Stable Diffusion 3 Medium weights

    The 2-billion-parameter weights ran on consumer GPUs but were licensed non-commercially, with a separate paid Enterprise tier for large-scale business use.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem

  7. Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque resigns

    He left amid a cash crunch and an exodus of core Stable Diffusion researchers, who months later founded the rival Black Forest Labs, saying centralised AI needed challenging.

    Labs & people

  8. Stability AI previews Stable Diffusion 3

    The suite spans 800 million to 8 billion parameters and combines a diffusion transformer with flow matching, aimed chiefly at fixing text rendering and multi-subject prompts.

    Models & capabilities

  9. Beijing court grants copyright to an AI-generated image, splitting with the US

    The Beijing Internet Court credited the prompter, not the AI or its developer, with authorship — the opposite conclusion the US Copyright Office had reached on Stable Diffusion images months earlier.

    Courts & copyright

  10. Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion XL

    The two-stage model, combining a 3.5B-parameter base and 6.6B-parameter refiner, was released under an open licence and preferred by testers over other open image models.

    Models & capabilities · Open weights & ecosystem

  11. Amazon launches Bedrock

    Bedrock offered API access to models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI alongside Amazon's own unreleased Titan models, rather than a single house model.

    Money & business

  12. Getty Images sues Stability AI

    Getty's UK High Court claim alleged around 11 million of its images were used to train Stable Diffusion without a licence; a separate US suit followed in February.

    Courts & copyright

  13. Artists file a class action over image generators

    Illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz sued in the Northern District of California, the first case brought by creators rather than rights-holding companies.

    Courts & copyright

  14. Stability AI raises $101 million

    Coatue and Lightspeed led the round at roughly a $1bn valuation, confirming that giving weights away free could still attract institutional capital.

    Money & business · Open weights & ecosystem

  15. Stable Diffusion is released to the public

    Weights published under a permissive licence and runnable on a consumer graphics card, with community fine-tunes and graphical front-ends appearing within weeks.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

Also mentioned in 9 entries

Referenced in passing — Stability AI isn't the main subject of these.