Getty Images licenses content to OpenAI three years after suing an A.I. rival

Getty Images has agreed to display its licensed photographs inside OpenAI's ChatGPT under a multi-year partnership the stock-photo company announced June 21, a turn for a business that spent the past three years positioning itself as a critic of artificial intelligence.

“Under the partnership, Getty Images’ licensed content libraries will appear across OpenAI search and discovery experiences within ChatGPT,” Getty Images said in a news release.

The companies framed the deal as a way to improve the visual results ChatGPT users receive. Neither disclosed the length of the "multi-year" term, the deal's value, or how much of Getty's library it covers.

"High-quality, licensed visual content makes A.I.-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy,” said Craig Peters, chief executive of Getty Images. “This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will deliver richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users.”

The agreement is described as a display partnership integrating Getty’s licensed content into ChatGPT’s search and discovery features, and a company representative confirmed to Fast Company that the deal is display-only.  An earlier display deal with Perplexity, announced in October, also did not permit its images to be used for training.

The partnership marks a sharp shift for a company that took Stability AI, maker of the Stable Diffusion image generator, to court on two continents over allegations it copied millions of Getty photographs to train the model without permission. Getty filed one case in the United States in early 2023 and another in the United Kingdom.

The British case ended largely in Stability AI's favor. In a judgment on November 4, 2025, the High Court of England and Wales rejected Getty's central copyright claim, finding that Stable Diffusion's model weights did not store or constitute an infringing copy of Getty's images.

Getty had abandoned its primary copyright and database right claims during the trial after conceding it could not show that the model's training took place in the U.K. The court found limited trademark infringement stemming from Getty watermarks appearing in some early Stable Diffusion outputs.

The stock image firm cast that outcome as a partial victory, calling it "a significant win for intellectual property owners." The company said the ruling confirmed that responsibility for the watermarks lay with the model's provider rather than its users, and that its copyright-protected works had been used to train Stable Diffusion, regardless of where that training took place.

Getty has been granted permission to appeal the copyright finding.

The U.S. case is still developing. Getty first sued in Delaware in February 2023, then dismissed that complaint and refiled in the Northern District of California in August 2025.

In April 2026, a federal judge there dismissed only one of Getty's claims, brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and allowed the rest — including copyright and trademark infringement — to move forward. The next case management conference is scheduled for November.

And in 2025, Getty and Shutterstock announced they would merge amid increased pressure from the rise of artificial intelligence.

Craig Peters, the chief executive of Getty Images, told contributors in the email at the time that Getty Images believes in “the need to compensate creators for the use of their work” amid the rise of A.I.

U.S. antitrust regulators cleared the deal unconditionally in February. The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority cleared it in May on the condition that Getty divest Shutterstock's editorial business.

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