Andersen v. Stability AI is a putative class action in which visual artists challenge the creation and use of Stable Diffusion, the image model developed and released by Stability AI. Artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz filed against three sets of defendants: Stability AI Ltd. and Stability AI, Inc.; DeviantArt, Inc.; and Midjourney, Inc.[1] A first amended complaint added seven plaintiffs and a fourth defendant, Runway AI, Inc.[2] The case is relevant to licensing because it asks whether training a model on copyrighted works and distributing it for free, under an open licence, is itself an infringing act, and how the commercial terms of the services built on the model interact with those claims.
Background
The complaint alleged that Stability created and released Stable Diffusion in August 2022 under a “permission open-source license”, and that it downloaded or otherwise acquired copies of billions of copyrighted images, scraped through the LAION datasets, to train the model.[1] It alleged that the model is a “software library” used in DreamStudio (Stability’s product, billed in credits), DeviantArt’s DreamUp and the Midjourney product.[1] Midjourney was alleged to have launched a beta in July 2022 and to be offered to Discord users and through an app for a fee.[1] Plaintiffs relied on a statement by Stability’s chief executive that the company had taken 100,000 gigabytes of images and compressed them to a two-gigabyte file that can recreate them, and argued that the trained model contains compressed copies.[2]
The dispute
The first complaint pleaded direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, statutory and common law right of publicity, unfair competition and declaratory relief against all three defendants, plus breach of contract against DeviantArt only.[1] In the amended complaint, plaintiffs asserted six classes and, against Stability, direct infringement by training, inducement of infringement by distributing Stable Diffusion for free, DMCA claims and unjust enrichment. Against Midjourney they pleaded direct infringement by training its models, DMCA claims, two Lanham Act claims (false endorsement through use of artists’ names and vicarious trade dress) and unjust enrichment.[2]
Decision or outcome
Order of 30 October 2023. Judge William H. Orrick granted the motions to dismiss in full except for the direct copyright infringement claim by Andersen against Stability, with leave to amend.[1] Defendants argued that McKernan and Ortiz had not registered their works; plaintiffs did not contest this and their counsel said they were not asserting copyright claims for those two artists, so those claims were dismissed with prejudice; Andersen’s claims were limited to the collections she had registered.[1] The court found direct infringement against Stability adequately alleged on the theory that it copied billions of images to train Stable Diffusion, and gave plaintiffs leave to clarify their “compressed copies” theory.[1] Vicarious infringement claims against DeviantArt and Midjourney failed for want of an underlying direct infringement claim against them, and the right of publicity claims were dismissed with leave to amend.[1] The motion to strike the class allegations was denied as premature.[1]
Order of 12 August 2024. On the amended complaint the court granted the motions in part. The DMCA claims were dismissed with prejudice, the unjust enrichment claims were dismissed with one last leave to amend, DeviantArt’s breach of contract and implied covenant claims were dismissed with prejudice, and the motions to dismiss the Copyright Act claims were denied, as was Midjourney’s motion to dismiss the Lanham Act claims.[2] On inducement, the court held the allegations sufficient: the plausible inference at that stage was that Stable Diffusion “by operation by end users creates copyright infringement and was created to facilitate that infringement by design”, and whether this was true or the result of a glitch would be tested later.[2] The contract claim failed because nothing in the DeviantArt terms of service limited DeviantArt’s use of plaintiffs’ works that were available from another source, namely the LAION datasets incorporated into Stable Diffusion.[2]
Later stages. The case then moved to discovery, which has included protective-order, deposition and e-discovery protocols and disputes about the production of training data.[3] A joint stipulation and order of 1 July 2026 recorded a fact-witness deposition deadline of 15 August 2026 and contention interrogatories involving all defendants.[3] The latest order in the public court record reviewed, of 25 August 2026, resolved a sealing request by Midjourney.[4] No ruling on the merits of infringement, fair use or class certification appears in the records reviewed.
Significance for software licensing and SAM practice
The case does not decide whether using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney infringes anyone’s copyright, and a customer of either service should not read the pleading-stage orders as findings. They matter in three ways. First, the court treated the model’s status (as a possible container of compressed copies) as a factual question for discovery, so licences that grant “ownership of outputs” or free self-hosted use do not answer the question whether the model itself is lawful, and indemnities offered by vendors, where they exist, are the relevant protection. See Stability AI licensing and Midjourney licensing. Second, the contract claim against DeviantArt shows that platform terms are read as written: a promise to use content only to display it was not read as a ban on a tool built from separately scraped data.[2] Third, the case sits beside the English decision in Getty Images v. Stability AI, where a different court reached a different view of whether model weights are infringing copies, which illustrates that outcomes differ by jurisdiction.
Lessons learned
- Model status is a fact question. The “compressed copies” theory was not dismissed, so the legal nature of model weights remains open in this court.[2]
- Free distribution under an open licence can still be pleaded as inducement. The inducement claim survived at the pleading stage.[2]
- Registration shapes the claims. Claims by artists whose works were unregistered were dismissed.[1]
- Platform terms bind only as far as they say. The breach claim against DeviantArt failed because its terms did not restrict the use alleged.[2]