OpenAI signed a multi-year deal with Getty Images, putting Getty’s licensed content libraries into ChatGPT and OpenAI search results. Getty Images stock roughly tripled on the news. Getty CEO Craig Peters said, “High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy. This partnership with OpenAI reflects a shared recognition of that.”
If you remember, back in November 2025, the UK High Court rejected Getty’s central copyright claim against Stability AI. The court held that AI model weights are not “copies” of the underlying training images under UK copyright law. Getty had to abandon its primary copyright claim partway through trial because it could not establish that the acts of reproduction or storage of its images had occurred within UK jurisdiction. The court delivered only narrow liability on a separate issue around watermark imitation. Training-data collapsed as a litigation strategy.
The OpenAI deal is the second confirmation of a new pattern: paid display of licensed editorial imagery inside an AI search surface. In October 2025, Getty signed a multi-year global license with Perplexity covering display of Getty content inside Perplexity’s AI search, with attribution, and credit links back to sources. It explicitly excluded training rights.
Queries about real people, real events, and real places benefit from images of those actual people, events, and places. Trust in AI search depends on the image being a real record of a real moment. Is this the next phase of editorial content monetization?
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Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.