That they funded the model is not in question. It is that they claimed they owned the IP to said model in pitches/messaging to investors when they in fact, did not.
Yeah, we were always really clear about that, the GitHub is clearly CompVis for example.
We fund dozens of models and collaborate on them too, the ones we assert IP over are those in our GitHub as benchmark models based on open research coded and trained from scratch.
It gets really complex otherwise when you have lots of collaborators eg on the LAION models.
Yes, even if they did do that which they didn't, that is also what OpenAI, etc do with their models like GPT and Dall-E when infact they come off papers like Transformers is all you need and the same LMU paper.
Stability has done it better since they purposely acknowledge the researchers instead of the way the public domain research is just used to make their own model with no acknowledgements (no co created mention anywhere). OpenAI would say 'co created by Google' if they did.
They certainly did that better than the way OpenAI did, or Midjourney did.