Getty Images has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI to allow licensed photographs from its catalog to appear within ChatGPT‘s search and discovery functions. The deal follows a period of intense litigation between Getty and generative AI firms, including a lawsuit against Stability AI and the company’s own development of an image generation tool. OpenAI has not disclosed the financial terms or confirmed whether Getty content will be used to train future models, though the announcement caused Getty’s share price to jump by roughly 200 percent in premarket trading.
This arrangement matters because it establishes a commercial pathway for high-quality licensed imagery to coexist with large language models without requiring the provider to scrape unlicensed data. The agreement signals that OpenAI is prioritising verified sources for visual search results to improve utility and trustworthiness, even as the company faces ongoing scrutiny over its training data practices. Getty remains under pressure regarding its pending $3.7 billion acquisition of Shutterstock and its long-term strategy in a market increasingly dominated by synthetic media.
* Getty stock had previously fallen by roughly 55 percent earlier this year.
* CEO Craig Peters stated licensed content makes AI search more useful.
* OpenAI has not confirmed if Getty content will train future models.
