Getty Images stock soared as much as 200% in premarket trading after the company announced a major deal with OpenAI. The agreement puts Getty’s licensed photo library inside ChatGPT, marking a sharp reversal for a firm that long fought AI image tools.
Under the multi-year display partnership, Getty’s licensed content will appear across search and discovery features in ChatGPT. When a user asks the chatbot for something visual, it can now surface a real licensed Getty photograph with attribution. The deal turns the world’s largest AI chatbot into a distribution channel rather than a rival.
The companies stayed quiet on the most important details, though. They disclosed no financial terms and no revenue split. They also did not say whether Getty’s images could train future OpenAI models. That omission matters because training is exactly what Getty has spent years fighting in court.
The reversal is hard to overstate. Getty sued Stability AI in 2023, alleging the company scraped millions of images to train Stable Diffusion. In November 2025, the UK High Court rejected Getty’s central copyright claim and found only narrow trademark liability. Getty has since sought permission to appeal.
The stock move signals how badly investors had written off Getty’s future. Shares had fallen about 55% this year before the deal, closing at 61 cents on Friday. The premarket spike settled once regular trading opened, with intraday gains nearer 156%. Getty’s core business of licensing photos faces direct pressure from generative image tools.
The OpenAI deal fits a clear pattern for Getty. The company already signed agreements with Perplexity and renewed its Canva partnership. Chief Executive Craig Peters framed licensed content as making AI search more useful and trustworthy. For Getty, the logic reads as survival, placing its library inside the disruption instead of under it.
