Stability AI Ltd is a UK generative-AI company headquartered in London, founded in 2019 by Emad Mostaque and Cyrus Hodes, and best known for the August 2022 release of Stable Diffusion with source and weights available. Its model line has since extended to video (Stable Video Diffusion), audio (Stable Audio), 3D and text (Stable LM), and it reported about 170 employees in 2024 (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
The company occupies three distinct positions in AI policy. It made the first widely capable text-to-image model available under an open release, setting the template for the open-weights image ecosystem. It is the defendant in two of the three first-wave generative-AI copyright actions. And its collapse in 2023–24 dispersed the research team that built its models, most consequentially into Black Forest Labs.
History
Stable Diffusion's open release in August 2022 was the event that brought the company to prominence and made high-quality text-to-image generation broadly available (Source: en.wikipedia.org). The company raised $101 million in October 2022 in a round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with O'Shaughnessy Ventures participating, at a reported $1 billion valuation (Source: techcrunch.com).
Financial difficulty followed. The Financial Times reported in March 2024 on the "chaotic departure" of Mostaque and doubts over the company's future; Mostaque stepped down as chief executive on March 23, 2024, saying he would pursue decentralized AI, with chief operating officer Shan Shan Wong and chief technology officer Christian Laforte appointed interim co-chief executives (Source: theverge.com; ft.com).
On June 25, 2024 the company appointed Prem Akkaraju, former chief executive of the visual-effects company Weta Digital, as chief executive, and closed a funding round reported at roughly $80 million from Greycroft, Coatue, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed and O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Sean Parker joined the board as executive chairman (Source: techcrunch.com; siliconangle.com). Filmmaker James Cameron joined the board on September 24, 2024 (Source: variety.com).
The company's financial trouble in 2023 prompted departures from its Freiburg im Breisgau office; those researchers founded Black Forest Labs in 2024, which by December 2025 was valued at $3.25 billion (Source: deutschlandfunk.de).
Litigation
Stability AI is the defendant in both surviving strands of the first-wave image-model copyright litigation.
Andersen v. Stability AI (N.D. Cal., filed January 13, 2023) is a putative class action by visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI and DeviantArt over the use of copyrighted images in training. It is the earliest of the generative-AI copyright suits and remains active without a merits ruling on fair use.
Getty Images (US) v. Stability AI (D. Del., filed February 3, 2023) alleged misuse of more than 12 million Getty photographs to train Stable Diffusion. Getty voluntarily dismissed the US case on August 14, 2025 without a merits ruling. Getty brought a parallel action in the High Court of England and Wales, where in November 2025 the court ruled that Stability AI had not committed copyright infringement in using Getty images as training data — an outcome The Economist characterized as satisfying neither side (Source: economist.com).
Separately, co-founder Cyrus Hodes sued Mostaque and the company in the Northern District of California in July 2023, alleging fraud, misrepresentation and breach of fiduciary duty in the sale of his 15% stake for $100 across two transactions in October 2021 and May 2022, three months before the $101 million round at a $1 billion valuation (Source: reuters.com).
Relationships
- related: Black Forest Labs — founded in 2024 by researchers who left Stability AI's Freiburg office
- litigates: Andersen v. Stability AI, Getty Images v. Stability AI (US)
- related: Midjourney, Runway, Open-Source AI / Open-Weight Models, AI Copyright
Confidence note: medium — the corporate history rests substantially on a Wikipedia synthesis of contemporaneous reporting rather than on primary filings; the litigation record is corroborated by the dedicated case pages. No 2026 financial or product update was located in this pass.