For most of the generative-AI era, Getty Images has been the industry’s most determined courtroom opponent, the stock-photo giant that sued the people building image generators rather than licensing to them.
On Monday it changed sides, and the market rewarded the pivot with the kind of move stock photos are not usually associated with.
Getty shares jumped about 200 per cent in premarket trading after the company announced a deal to put its pictures inside ChatGPT.
The agreement, announced on 21 June, is a multi-year display partnership with OpenAI.
Under it, Getty’s licensed content libraries will appear across the search and discovery features of ChatGPT, so that when a user asks the chatbot something that calls for an image, the visual it gets back can be a licensed Getty photograph rather than a synthetic approximation.
The pitch, in the words of Getty chief executive Craig Peters, is that high-quality licensed content makes AI-powered search “more useful and more trustworthy.”
What the companies did not say is as notable as what they did. The release disclosed no financial terms, no revenue split, and, pointedly, nothing about whether Getty’s images may be used to train future OpenAI models.
That last omission matters, because training is the precise activity Getty has spent years in court trying to stop, and the deal as described is about display, surfacing existing licensed pictures, rather than about feeding them into a model.
The reversal is hard to overstate. Getty sued Stability AI, the company behind the Stable Diffusion image generator, on both sides of the Atlantic, alleging that around 12 million of its images had been scraped without permission to train the model.
In November 2025 the UK High Court handed down its judgment and largely sided with Stability, rejecting Getty’s central copyright claim and finding only narrow liability on a trademark point. Getty was later granted permission to appeal part of the ruling.
The OpenAI deal, struck while that fight is still live, looks like a company hedging in public: keep litigating where you have been wronged, sign where you can be paid.
It also fits a pattern OpenAI has spent two years building. The company has signed content arrangements with a long list of publishers, from News Corp to the Financial Times and Axel Springer, even as a separate cohort of rights-holders, including Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, has chosen to sue instead. Getty is now the most prominent name to cross from one column to the other, and the first major visual-content owner to do so on this scale.
For OpenAI, the appeal is obvious: licensed photography lets it show users a real picture with a clear provenance, a useful thing as it stuffs ChatGPT with advertising and commerce and tries to justify an $852bn valuation its own investors have begun to question.
For Getty, the logic is survival as much as strategy. The company’s core business, licensing photographs to media and marketers, is precisely the work generative image tools threaten to undercut, by producing a passable substitute for free.
A deal that turns the largest AI chatbot into a distribution channel for licensed Getty pictures, rather than a competitor that renders them obsolete, is a way of being inside the disruption instead of under it.
The 200 per cent move suggests investors had been pricing Getty closer to the second outcome than the first.
The figure itself comes with a caveat: a premarket spike of that size tends to settle once regular trading opens, and at least one source put the intraday gain nearer 156 per cent.
Either way the direction is the same, and so is the story underneath it. The company that tried hardest to fight AI in court has decided the more durable position is to license to it.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
