Getty Sued. Shutterstock Signed. Then in January 2025 They Announced a Merger.
The sequence of events from Shutterstock's AI licensing deal through Getty's Stability AI lawsuit and generator launch to the January 2025 merger announcement — a timeline of the two largest stock agencies converging after taking opposite positions on the same question.
Two companies that staked out opposite positions on AI licensing ended the argument by announcing they would become one.
From Opposite Corners to One Announcement
Shutterstock took the licensing route. In July 2023, the agency signed a licensing deal with OpenAI, granting access to its library for AI model training in exchange for compensation routed back to contributors through a dedicated fund. The terms were not published in full, but the structure — bulk library access traded for a revenue share — set a template the industry was still arguing about when Getty made its countermove.
Getty chose litigation. In February 2023, Getty Images filed suit against Stability AI in a US federal court, alleging that Stability AI had scraped and used millions of Getty photographs without licence to train its Stable Diffusion model. The complaint pointed to watermarked Getty images appearing in the model's outputs as evidence. That case remained active through 2024, proceeding in both a US district court and a parallel action in the UK.
Rather than stopping there, Getty then built its own generator. In September 2023, the company launched Generative AI by Getty Images, a tool trained exclusively on licensed, rights-cleared content from its own library. Contributors whose work trained the model were promised compensation. The product was a direct argument that a legally clean generative tool was possible — and that the lawsuit and the product were the same statement made in two registers.
Shutterstock followed a similar logic in its own direction, expanding its AI licensing programme and integrating generative tools into its platform. The US Copyright Office, meanwhile, continued its ongoing study of AI and copyright, releasing policy guidance through 2024 that left the core question of training-data licensing unresolved by statute.
Then, in January 2025, Getty Images and Shutterstock announced a definitive merger agreement. The combined entity would hold one of the largest commercially licensed image libraries in existence. Regulatory review was expected; the deal had not yet closed at announcement. What the merger means for the Stability AI litigation — whether Getty pursues it, settles, or uses it as leverage in a combined negotiation posture — was not stated.
The symmetry is notable. One company sued over unauthorised training data. The other licensed its library and built a fund to pay contributors. Both then announced they would operate as a single business. Whether that business inherits the lawsuit, the licensing model, or some negotiated combination of both is the question the stock-licensing economics now hang on. The two largest players in commercial stock just removed the competitive distance between their AI positions by eliminating the competition.
