Higgsfield tells ComfyUI to pull its open-source challenge

Higgsfield, the AI video platform led by chief executive Alex Mashrabov, sent the open-source software company Comfy a cease-and-desist letter the night of October 28, 2026 demanding that it take down its "Open Source Higgsfield" challenge within 48 hours, according to Comfy, which says it will not comply. The letter's contents are reported by Comfy. No public statement from Higgsfield or Mashrabov has been found, and a cease-and-desist is a demand, not a ruling, that establishes no violation.

Comfy is the company behind ComfyUI, the open-source workflow engine for image and video generation. Its co-founder, Yoland Yan, posted the letter as an image in a thread on X (@yoland_yan) on October 29, writing that Higgsfield wants the challenge taken down within 48 hours. The official @ComfyUI account posted later the same day that the challenge stays open, that final submissions closed on October 30, and that winners are announced November 6, with prizes paid as promised.

According to Comfy's account, the letter objects to the challenge's use of the Higgsfield name and to the use of Mashrabov's likeness, arguing the two together suggest Higgsfield is behind the event. Comfy says it has made clear the contest is organized by ComfyUI and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Higgsfield. Two outlets that describe the document, the publication LHC and ArtRealmAI, date the letter October 28 and say it cites the Lanham Act, the US law on trademarks and unfair competition, and asks that documents tied to the campaign be preserved. Those details are secondhand, and SLOP TV did not obtain the letter itself.

The challenge opened on October 15, when the ComfyUI account posted that Higgsfield "promised to open-source their entire platform. They didn't," and put up $25,000 in prizes for open-source rebuilds of Higgsfield's Genjutsu and Cinema Studio on the Comfy Developer Platform. SLOP TV covered the bounty at the time. The stated prize pool is a $10,000 grand prize, three RTX 5090 cards for the Most Innovative, Most Viral and Open Weights Only categories, and ten $250 credit runners-up, with NVIDIA AI, RunPod, MiniMax, LTX and Black Forest Labs as partners adding cash and API credits. The cease-and-desist is new. It arrived two weeks after the challenge opened.

The claim that Higgsfield promised to open-source its platform is Comfy's, and no primary Higgsfield statement making that promise has been linked. The analysis site explainx.ai lists the claim as unverified in a claimed-versus-verified breakdown published October 30, and reports that Higgsfield's help-center page describes its platform and models as proprietary and names higgsfield.ai as the only official place to sign in and generate. What Higgsfield has released publicly is an API and code on GitHub, not its platform or its model weights. explainx.ai also notes that the contest ran for two weeks before any reported objection.

The dispute drew reaction from creators. LHC reported that the creator collective The Dor Brothers publicly sided against Higgsfield and said it would not hire former Higgsfield employees.

For creators, the contest's entries matter more than the dispute. If the challenge runs to completion, the winning builds would be public repositories under open-source licenses that anyone can run, and Comfy's Open Weights Only category requires entries to work without proprietary APIs. The letter, as Comfy describes it, targets the challenge's branding rather than its code, and Comfy says its pages remain live. Whether the name and likeness use crosses a legal line is unsettled; no court has ruled, and none of the accounts found for this story showed a filing. SLOP TV contacted nobody for this story.

The 48-hour deadline Comfy says the letter set runs out at the end of October 2026; Comfy says the challenge's winners are due on November 6, 2026.