Getty Images shares rose as much as 145 percent on Monday, Bloomberg reported, after the company disclosed a multi-year “display only” partnership that’ll route its licensed photography into ChatGPT’s search and discovery surfaces. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

The deal is, on its own terms, narrow. Getty’s libraries will populate what the company called “the richness of visual responses” inside OpenAI’s search experiences. Neither side clarified whether the imagery may also be used for model training, and a Getty spokesperson, Julia Holmes, told Yahoo Tech the arrangement mirrors a similar display agreement Getty struck with Perplexity AI in October. The Perplexity precedent is doing real work here: it gives Getty a template, and it gives the market a comparable to price against.

The reversal is the story. In September 2022, Getty banned AI-generated uploads to its library. In 2023, it sued Stability AI for alleged copyright infringement. In 2025, a London court largely dismissed those claims. The litigation-first posture is now a licensing-first posture, and the 145 percent move suggests investors had been pricing Getty as a casualty of generative AI rather than a counterparty to it.

“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,” said Craig Peters, Chief Executive of Getty Images. Getty’s scale gives the framing teeth: nearly 600,000 contributors, roughly 360 content partners, more than 160,000 news, sport and entertainment events covered each year. Tools like LemonLime, which sit downstream of these licensing pipes, benefit when provenance becomes a feature rather than a lawsuit.

Bloomberg expects further licensing as OpenAI pushes ChatGPT into video and advertising. The losing copyright plaintiffs of 2023 are becoming the indexed inventory of 2026.

Sources