One of the biggest imaging companies has struck a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI, a dramatic turnaround for a company that lost a high-profile copyright battle against another intelligence developer.
Getty Images said the deal will see images from the library within ChatGPT’s search display, wrapping rich visual features into the chatbot. Worse, the agreement stops short of giving OpenAI the keys to Getty’s archive: it does not allow the images to be used to train OpenAI’s image generator, Dall-E. Neither company disclosed financial terms.
Investors liked what they saw. Shares of Getty Images jumped as much as 65 cents, or about 108 percent, to $1.26 in afternoon trading in New York, a rare burst of optimism for a stock that has been battered this year.
Craig Peters, chief executive of Getty Images, framed the deal as a vote to trust licensed content over free-for-all that has explained much of AI’s takeover of the world. “High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more reliable,” he said. “This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that, and together we will bring a rich visual experience to ChatGPT users.” The full terms are laid out in Getty’s own announcement of the partnership.
Getty’s complete catalog stands at approximately 609 million images, making it one of the largest photo platforms in the world. Yet scale provided little protection from market crises. Shares have shed more than 50 percent of their value this year, dragged down by fears that AI-powered image generators could eliminate the need for traditional image libraries entirely.
That underlying concern helps explain one of Getty’s biggest moves: the company is finalizing a $3.7 billion merger with longtime rival Shutterstock. The two argue that joining forces will create a business with a comparable image library and, more importantly, the scale to invest in its own image production models rather than simply handing over territory to Silicon Valley.
The OpenAI agreement marks a dramatic strategic pivot. In 2023, Getty sued Stability AI, the UK-based developer behind the Stable Diffusion model, alleging that it removed more than 12 million images from Getty’s library without permission.
The case proved a cautionary tale about the limitations of existing copyright law. Unable to prove that the training took place in the UK, Getty was forced to return for a second infringement claim, arguing that Stability had successfully imported an infringing product that breached British copyright laws. A Supreme Court judge found against the agency, ruling that the Stability model did not store or copy images from the Getty library. As Business Matters reported at the time of the ruling, the ruling was widely read as a setback for rights holders, as similar lawsuits are ongoing in the United States. Sustainability itself has previously been accused of being an “existential threat” to the manufacturing technology industry.
After exploring the court route and finding that it doesn’t, Getty seems to have concluded that licensing is the surest way to get paid.
It is not the only one. Across publishing, music and stock photography, licensing has emerged as the industry’s preferred answer to the AI question. Getty signed a similar deal with Perplexity AI last November, while OpenAI has secured deals with major publishers including News Corp, owner of The Times, as well as the Guardian and Financial Times. The chatbot’s growing commercial ambitions are becoming increasingly visible in other areas as well, from advertising trials within ChatGPT to its preparation for the start of the stock market.
For Getty, the calculation is straightforward enough. If AI tools are going to reshape the way people find and use images, an agency would rather be paid to be a part of that future than prosecuted for it. As Bloomberg noted, the market reaction suggests that investors, for now at least, agree.
