From sworn enemy of AI to partner of OpenAI: Getty Images' turnaround

Getty Images and OpenAI have announced a multi-year partnership that will bring the agency's content into ChatGPT, and Wall Street's reaction was immediate: Getty's stock (NYSE: GETY) surged over 200% in premarket trading, after a previous close of $0.64 per share. This marks a significant shift for the company, which in recent years had positioned itself as the most aggressive legal opponent of AI-based image generators.

The agreement with OpenAI did not come in isolation. Back in October 2025, Getty signed a similar deal with Perplexity AI, also limited to content display and without any clauses on model training. In other words, the direction had already been set.

According to the announced agreement, licensed Getty content will appear in ChatGPT's search and discovery functions. This is a display agreement, not a training one: the images are shown to users, not used to train the models. "Quality and regularly licensed visual content makes AI-based search and discovery more useful and reliable," said Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images. "This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of this, and together we will offer richer visual experiences to ChatGPT users."

The statement does not reveal the financial terms of the agreement, does not indicate any revenue sharing, and does not clarify whether Getty images can be used to train future OpenAI models. Hence, the economically delicate aspect for those licensing images to AI remains absent from the text.

From opponent in court to partner, Getty had sued Stability AI, the developer of Stable Diffusion, claiming that around 12 million of its images had been used without permission to train the model. In November 2025, the High Court in the UK largely ruled in favor of Stability, dismissing the main copyright claim and acknowledging only limited liability on a trademark-related point; Getty was later granted permission to appeal part of the judgment.

The trajectory is even more pronounced when looking further back. In September 2022, the agency had banned AI-generated works from its library. Since then, the position has gradually softened, culminating in the launch of its own generative AI tool, trained on its internal library and built on NVIDIA's Edify model, with the produced images released under a royalty-free license.

For OpenAI, the agreement fits into a series of content arrangements built over the past two years, already including News Corp, the Financial Times, and Axel Springer. Getty, described in the release as a global marketplace for visual content with approximately 600,000 creators and about 360 content partners, adds to that collection the piece of professional stock images.