Getty Images

Founded in 1995 by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein, Getty Images grew into the dominant licensor of editorial and stock photography, representing the work of hundreds of thousands of photographers and creators. In January 2023 it became the first major rights-holder to take a generative AI company to court, suing Stability AI — maker of Stable Diffusion — in both London’s High Court and US federal court in Delaware.

Getty v. Stability AI

Getty alleged Stability scraped more than 12 million of its photographs, captions and metadata without permission — “brazen infringement” on “a staggering scale,” in the words of its US complaint — noting that Stable Diffusion outputs sometimes even reproduced mangled Getty watermarks. CEO Craig Peters has said the company is spending millions of dollars on the fight, framing unlicensed training as theft from creators, much as artists like Karla Ortiz argued in their parallel class action against Stability.

The UK case ended in a qualified defeat: Getty dropped its primary copyright claims mid-trial after conceding the training happened outside the UK, and on November 4, 2025, the High Court rejected the secondary copyright claim — ruling model weights are not an infringing copy — while finding only limited trademark infringement over the watermarks. The US case continues, with far broader copyright claims in play.

Anti-scraping, not anti-AI

Getty’s stance is against unlicensed training rather than the technology itself. In September 2023 it launched Generative AI by Getty Images, a generator built with NVIDIA and trained exclusively on Getty’s own licensed library, with contributors compensated and customers indemnified. Peters has argued that respecting fair use limits will not stop AI progress — the company wants a licensing market, not a ban.