Does LAION datasets respect copyright laws?

LAION datasets are indexes to the internet with lists of URLs and ALT texts. While embeddings were computed for similarity, the actual photos were discarded. Researchers must download subsets themselves using tools like img2dataset.

What if I found my personal data in the dataset?

If your name appears only in ALT text without your image, it is not personal data under GDPR. If your image is included, you can request removal through the GDPR takedown form on the GDPR page.

Does LAION store original images or media?

No, LAION datasets contain only metadata such as captions or alt texts and URL links pointing to original content on the public web. No original media samples are stored or distributed.

Do the datasets contain images that may be disturbing for viewers?

No, but links in the datasets can lead to images that are disturbing or discomforting depending on the filter or search method employed.

I found a dataset containing images while searching on the internet. What about copyright then?

Any dataset containing images is not released by LAION, it must have been reconstructed with the provided tools by other people. We do not host and also do not provide links on our website to access such datasets. Please refer only to links we provide for official released data.

Open source AI · Germany

LAION

Open AI research for everyone

Try laion.ai (new tab)0 votes. Log in to give LAION a nod

Community votes: 0
DR by Ahrefs: 75 no change since last check

Ahrefs Domain Rating benchmarked 26 Oct 2026, rebuilt 26 Oct 2026.

A non-profit research network building open datasets, models, and tools for machine learning research and public education.

What it is

Screenshot of the LAION homepage — laion.ai, as visitors see it

LAION is a non-profit research network that makes large-scale machine-learning resources available to the public. The organization brings together researchers, engineers, and contributors from around the world to broaden access to machine-learning research through public datasets, models, and code.

LAION develops resources that researchers can inspect, evaluate, and reuse. Their work spans multimodal datasets, open models, training and evaluation tools, and educational assistants. Each release documents its own access conditions and intended uses.

The organization is supported by donations and public research grants, enabling them to make machine-learning datasets, models, and code available for research and public education.

What it is built with

Large-scale multimodal datasets
Open models and training code
Video dataset (LAION-BVD) with 10 million hours
Text-image dataset (Re-LAION-5B) with 5.5 billion pairs
OpenCLIP for contrastive language-image training
Educational AI assistant (BUD-E)
Reproducible research tools and evaluation methods

Pricing

Pricing model: Open source

LAION metrics

Benchmarks for laion.ai: Ahrefs Domain Rating and Majestic link data, with the change since the last build.
Metric	Value
Domain Rating	75 no change since last check
Trust Flow	18 no change since last check
Citation Flow	43 no change since last check
Referring domains	2,548 no change since last check
External backlinks	45,182 no change since last check

Ahrefs Domain Rating benchmarked 26 Oct 2026, rebuilt 26 Oct 2026. Main build topic: Society/Law (15). Majestic benchmarked 26 Oct 2026, rebuilt 26 Oct 2026. Link data built by Majestic. Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Topical Trust Flow are trademarks of Majestic-12 Ltd.

LAION domain build sheet

Open the build sheet

Public RDAP record, last read 26 Oct 2026, 15:50 UTC.
Domain age	5 years
Registered	12 Aug 2021
Expires	12 Aug 2027
Registrar	NameCheap, Inc.
DNSSEC	Not signed

Inspect laion.ai's registration

Compare and explore

Questions from the bench

Does LAION datasets respect copyright laws?: LAION datasets are indexes to the internet with lists of URLs and ALT texts. While embeddings were computed for similarity, the actual photos were discarded. Researchers must download subsets themselves using tools like img2dataset.
What if I found my personal data in the dataset?: If your name appears only in ALT text without your image, it is not personal data under GDPR. If your image is included, you can request removal through the GDPR takedown form on the GDPR page.
Does LAION store original images or media?: No, LAION datasets contain only metadata such as captions or alt texts and URL links pointing to original content on the public web. No original media samples are stored or distributed.
Do the datasets contain images that may be disturbing for viewers?: No, but links in the datasets can lead to images that are disturbing or discomforting depending on the filter or search method employed.
I found a dataset containing images while searching on the internet. What about copyright then?: Any dataset containing images is not released by LAION, it must have been reconstructed with the provided tools by other people. We do not host and also do not provide links on our website to access such datasets. Please refer only to links we provide for official released data.

Find LAION online

Leave a review for LAION

Nobody has put LAION on the bench yet. Leave the first review.

Reviewing is free, and nobody can pay for a review. Read the bench notes

Maker reviews · Workshop notes · Show it off · Did you make this? Claim it · Report this build

More builds like this

#1

Number 1: Boole-1.7B

A 1-bit language model with 247 MB of stored weights
- Open source AI
- DR 2 −1 (down) since last check
0 votes. Log in to give Boole-1.7B a nod