Leonardo AI

About Leonardo AI

Leonardo AI was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2022 and has grown rapidly into one of the most feature-rich consumer and prosumer AI image generation platforms available. It offers a web-based image generation suite, a video generation tool (Leonardo Motion), real-time canvas editing, and the ability to fine-tune custom AI models on user-uploaded training images — a feature particularly valued by game studios, concept artists, and consistent brand visual production teams. The platform supports a wide range of base models including its own proprietary models (Leonardo Diffusion, Phoenix, Kino XL) as well as community-trained and fine-tuned variants. This fine-tuning capability is a significant differentiator: organisations can upload brand assets and train a custom model that generates images consistent with their visual identity, without expensive design hours. For compliance-focused buyers, the key consideration is that while Leonardo AI is Australian-incorporated, its infrastructure is hosted on AWS in the United States. This means all generated content, prompts, and training images are processed in and stored in US data centres. Australia has a bilateral data access agreement with the US under the CLOUD Act framework (CISA), which extends some of the US government access concerns beyond just US-incorporated companies to Australian providers with US infrastructure. Leonardo AI does not train its production models on paid user content by default, and its privacy policy confirms user ownership of generated content. However, the lack of a EU data residency option and the absence of ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications as of early 2026 means it requires significant due diligence for deployment in regulated European industries. Pricing is credit-based with a free tier (150 tokens/day), an Apprentice plan at $12/month (1,500 credits/month), an Artisan plan at $30/month (8,500 credits/month), and a Maestro plan at $60/month (25,000 credits/month). API access is available for developers. For European creative teams without strict data sovereignty requirements, Leonardo AI offers excellent value and capability. For regulated contexts, EU-native alternatives like FLUX or Freepik AI should be considered first.