Leonardo Diffusion XL
Leonardo's earlier fine-tuned Stable Diffusion XL base model
Leonardo Diffusion XL is one of Leonardo AI’s earlier in-house models, a fine-tune built on Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL architecture rather than a model trained from scratch. It was tuned to produce strong results from short, simple prompts, which made it a popular default for users who did not want to write long descriptive prompts to get usable output. It covers a broad range of styles, from photography to illustration, and became one of the more widely used models on the Leonardo platform before the company shipped its own foundational model, Phoenix, at the end of 2024. Leonardo AI, founded in Sydney in 2022, was acquired by Canva in July 2024, and Diffusion XL is now maintained mainly for users with existing workflows built around it rather than promoted as the platform’s leading option.