Getty Images and OpenAI strike display deal for ChatGPT search results

Getty Images has struck a multi-year display agreement with OpenAI that will put Getty’s licensed content into OpenAI search and discovery experiences inside ChatGPT. The June 21 announcement moves one of the photo industry’s biggest licensing libraries directly into the interface where people increasingly look for answers, references and visual context.

For photographers, the scale matters as much as the headline. Getty said in its 2025 results that it works with more than 600,000 content creators and more than 360 content partners, and its annual-report materials describe more than 645 million assets and more than 1,650 employees worldwide. Craig Peters, Getty’s chief executive, framed the deal as a way to make AI search better behaved, saying, “High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy.” That is a clear signal that Getty wants licensed photography, not scraped imagery, to become part of the default AI discovery layer.

The market read the agreement as more than a routine distribution update. Getty Images Holdings, Inc. shares jumped about 104% to $1.23 in one session after the disclosure, and another market account put the premarket move near 200%. That reaction tracks with how unusual the arrangement is: a stock-image company better known for protecting rights than for embracing AI is now helping shape how images appear inside a product used by millions of ChatGPT users.

The deal lands in the middle of Getty’s broader fight over unauthorized AI use. Getty has sued Stability AI over alleged scraping of copyrighted images, and a November 2025 High Court ruling in Getty v. Stability AI was described as the first major UK decision to examine copyright and trademark law in generative AI. Getty also backed the U.S. No Fakes Act in 2026, underscoring that the company is still pressing for limits on deepfakes and likeness misuse even as it opens a commercial lane into OpenAI’s ecosystem.

What Getty did not spell out may matter most to working photographers. The announcement did not say how long the partnership will run, what exact images will appear, whether files can be altered, how attribution will be displayed, or whether OpenAI can use Getty images for model training. That leaves the deal suspended between two readings: a more creator-friendly licensing path into AI search, or simply a new distribution layer with the economics, controls and surface rules still hidden from view.