Midjourney bans all Stability AI employees over alleged data harvesting

Midjourney said it has banned Stability AI employees from using its services and blamed employees at a rival artificial intelligence-generating company for causing a system outage earlier this month while trying to steal Midjourney’s data.

Midjourney released an update to its Discord server on March 2, acknowledging that a prolonged server outage prevented generated images from appearing in users’ galleries. In a summary of its March 6 business update call, Midjourney claimed that “botnet-like activity from paid accounts” — which the company specifically linked to Stability AI employees — was behind the outage.

According to feedback from users Nick St. Pierre on XMidjourney, who listened to the call, said the service was shut down because “someone from Stability AI was trying to get all the prompts and image pairs in the middle of the night on a Saturday.” St. Pierre said Midjourney has linked multiple paid accounts with members of the Stability AI profile team. An individual is associated.

In a summary of its business update call on March 6, which Midjourney referred to as “office hours,” the company said it would ban all Preventing Stability AI employees from using its services “indefinitely” in response to outages. Midjourney has also launched a new policy that will also ban any company employees who implement “radical automation” or cause service interruptions.

saint pierre Flagged allegation Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque responded on X that he was investigating the situation and that Stability had not ordered relevant action. “It’s very confusing that the team hasn’t scraped 2 accounts yet because we’ve been using synthetic data and other data because SD3 outperforms all other models,” Mostaque said, referring to the current preview version Stable Diffusion 3 AI model.He claimed that if there was a power outage used to be If it was caused by a Stability employee, it was unintentional and “clearly not a DDoS attack.”

Midjourney founder David Holz responded to Mostaque in the same post, claiming that he had been sent “some information” to help with his internal investigation.

Beyond that, the situation is still developing and no other updates have been provided since the March 6 conversation.At the time of writing, neither Midjourney nor Stability AI had responded to requests for comment. edgeRequest for comment.