Discord Bans Shapes.inc

Discord Bans Shapes.inc: Timeline and Details

In early May 2025, Discord disabled thousands of “Shapes” bots and revoked the Shapes.io developer organization from its API. On May 1–2, dozens of server admins reported receiving emails from Discord stating that their Shapes applications had been disabled for violating the Developer Terms and Developer Policy.

Discord’s notice specifically accused Shapes of “unauthorized use of API data, including using message content to train models. Users found their bots gone from the Developer Portal and could no longer log into the Shapes dashboard (getting “Unknown Application” errors). There was no prior warning: as Shapes Inc later noted, Discord “terminated Shapes with zero warning on the basis of violations we find to be false and selectively applied”

The Ban of the shapes

The ban unfolded rapidly over a few days. Tech media and Reddit communities were filled up on May 2–3 with users sharing the Discord emails and screenshots. For example, a Discord developer on X (formerly Twitter) observed that “Discord has mass-banned many Shapes Inc Discord bots,” and noted that was a manual investigation (not an automated error). By May 2, Shapes Inc itself publicly acknowledged the action. The company’s social channels urged users to appeal Discord’s decision: a notice posted in the official Shapes Discord warned users that if they received a ban email, they should use the appeal link and tell Discord “this app did not train any AI model on Discord data”. Meanwhile, a detailed post on Reddit from a Shapes moderator (loamy) reassured the community: “Your Shapes are safe. They are not Discord API data. You can still access them on our website”, and asked fans to share their support on social media to “get Discord’s attention.”

Official and Unofficial Statements

Shapes Inc (Circle Labs) has vocally denied any wrongdoing. In public statements (on X and Reddit), the team called Discord’s action “unexpected, careless, cold, and unfair” They flatly rejected the claim of illicit data use: one Shapes representative wrote that the accusation of training on Discord messages was “simply not true” and “never happened.” Shapes pointed out that many popular bots (e.g. MEE6, Dyno) ask users to submit bot tokens for full functionality, and questioned why Discord was not targeting those services too. On the Shapes website and documentation, the company emphasized that user data (memories and chat logs) were stored on their own servers, not Discord’s, and that “Discord has no rights over your data or ours”. A pinned Reddit announcement by loamy (May 2) told users that they could still log into shapes.inc to retrieve their AI character data, and announced plans to launch a Shapes API and future multi-platform support.

Discord itself has made no public press statement about the ban. The only official communication has been via the emailed policy violation notices to users. Those emails cited specific Developer Policy sections, warning users that providing Shapes access to bot tokens and message content violated the rules, and instructed them to delete any shared API data. The email warned that failure to remove such data could lead to “further action” (even account suspension). Notably, Discord’s Developer Policy (updated 2023) explicitly forbids using message content obtained via the API to train any AI model without Discord’s permission. It also forbids soliciting or collecting user login tokens or credentials.

The bot token argument is a weak point tho, these people use it an never had issues : BotGhost, Quickchat AI, GPTBots... The list is long, and the only thing that makes sense in all of this is if shapes is training AI on the user's data, we can't be sure of that tho.