According to a recent tweet shared by AI enthusiast Nick St. Pierre, the alleged theft occurred last Saturday. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney’s database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage. In response, MJ reportedly banned all Stable Diffusion developers from its services, a move supposedly disclosed internally within the company on Wednesday.
I don’t think they care about the images being used, just the disruption of service. It’s pretty clear that this wasn’t a coordinated thing from Stability and was at most a lone individual acting in bad faith.
It’s pretty ironic though that the company that practices mass scraping has no rate limits to prevent outages due to mass scraping.