Getty Images announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI. The deal will see the platform’s licensed visual content integrated into the AI developer’s ChatGPT chatbot and its own search engine. Getty shares jumped nearly 150% in premarket trading on the news.
Getty Images announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI. The deal will see the platform’s licensed visual content integrated into the AI developer’s ChatGPT chatbot and its own search engine. Getty shares jumped nearly 150% in premarket trading on the news.
This is stated in an official statement from Getty Images. According to the CEO of the photo bank, Craig Peters, high-quality licensed content will help make searching and retrieving information using AI more reliable for users.
«High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and reliable. This partnership with OpenAI reflects our shared understanding of this, and together we will provide ChatGPT users with a richer visual experience,» said Craig Peters.
Getty Images Holdings, Inc. shares surged in premarket trading immediately after the deal was announced, jumping nearly 150% to $1.59 a share, the company’s highest since November of last year, putting Getty stock back on track for a year-to-date gain.
Before this move, GETY shares were under serious pressure: over the past 12 months, the company’s shares have lost more than 66% of their value, and since the beginning of the year their decline was almost 55% (as of the close of trading last Thursday, the share price was only 60 cents). It is currently unknown whether the company’s shares will be able to maintain these positions until the end of 2026.
The financial details of the deal are not being disclosed at this time. The parties also did not specify whether OpenAI will receive the right to use the Getty Images library directly to train future versions of its neural networks.
This move marks a significant shift in strategy for Getty Images, which previously took a tough stance on generative AI developers. In the fall of 2022, the photo bank completely banned the posting of images created by artificial intelligence in its database. In addition, the company initiated a lawsuit against the creators of Stability AI, accusing them of illegally using copyrighted works to train models (this claim was rejected by the court in late 2025).
Getty Images began its gradual shift towards the AI industry in 2023, launching its own secure image generator based on NVIDIA’s Edigy AI model. And in October 2025, the company signed its first major agreement with AI search engine Perplexity AI. As part of that cooperation, Perplexity committed to mandatory labeling of image sources and providing direct links to the platform’s authors to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
It was previously reported that OpenAI is planning the largest update to ChatGPT in its history, aiming to turn it into a «super app» with programming tools and AI agents to increase revenue ahead of a potential IPO.
