Similiar what @geosmart mentioned, it can be caused by a dependency.

In my case it came through a transitive dependency. Excluding it in the pom.xml stopped the validation force

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.my.company</groupId>
        <artifactId>my-artefact</artifactId>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>javax.validation</groupId>
                <artifactId>validation-api</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>