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Getty Images More Than Doubles After OpenAI Deal β€” But the Dollars Are Still Missing

A stock that was fighting to stay listed is suddenly at the center of the AI boom. The deal is real. Whether it justifies the move is another question.

Market MunchiesΒ·Jun 22, 2026Β·4 min read
Getty Images More Than Doubles After OpenAI Deal

Getty Images spent much of 2026 fighting to restore investor confidence. Shares had been trading in penny-stock territory, the company had received a formal warning from the New York Stock Exchange about its stock price, and its core business β€” licensing photographs to media companies and marketers β€” was under direct threat from AI image generators that could produce passable substitutes for free.

Then Sunday night, a deal changed the story.

Getty announced a multi-year display agreement with OpenAI to bring its licensed image library into ChatGPT's search and discovery features. Shares surged more than 150% in early trading Monday β€” one of the bigger single-day reversals of the year β€” as investors bet the company had found a way to be inside the AI disruption rather than under it. Whether the deal justifies that reaction depends on financial terms neither company has disclosed.

What the deal actually does

Under the agreement, Getty's licensed content will appear inside ChatGPT when users search for or discover visual content. Rather than relying only on generated or web-sourced visuals, ChatGPT will be able to surface licensed Getty photography in search and discovery experiences.

CEO Craig Peters framed it plainly: "High-quality, licensed visual content makes AI-powered search and discovery more useful and more trustworthy."

Importantly, this is a display agreement β€” not a model-training license. That distinction matters. The big debate in AI copyright is about whether companies can train their models on copyrighted content without permission. This deal is about showing Getty images inside ChatGPT, not about whether OpenAI can train on Getty's library. Investors still don't know how far the rights extend or how the economics work.

For OpenAI, which has been signing content deals across media and entertainment as it builds ChatGPT into a destination for search, shopping, and discovery, the partnership adds professionally shot, rights-cleared imagery with clear legal provenance β€” increasingly valuable as the company builds out advertising and commerce features.

Why the stock move is so large

The size of Monday's move reflects two things: how difficult the past year has been for Getty, and how transformative investors are judging this deal to be.

Getty shares had been near their 52-week low of around $0.58 heading into Monday. In March, the company received a formal written notice from the NYSE warning it was not in compliance with the exchange's minimum average closing price requirement, giving it six months to regain compliance. Q1 2026 results weren't much help: revenue grew just 1.1% year-over-year to $226.6 million, creative revenue fell 4.5%, and adjusted EBITDA dropped 12.2% to $61.6 million. The company carried $2 billion in debt against $96.6 million in cash, and in April drew down $120 million from its revolving credit line to pay a warrant-litigation judgment.

Against that backdrop, a distribution deal with the most widely used AI chatbot in the world reads as a significant shift. Even a premarket move that settles during regular trading represents a fundamental re-rating of what Getty's archive could be worth in the AI era.

Why this deal is bigger than one stock

Getty has been one of the loudest voices arguing that AI companies should pay for content rather than scrape it. In 2023 it sued Stability AI over the unauthorized use of its images to train Stable Diffusion. The UK High Court's November 2025 ruling was a mixed result: the court rejected Getty's core copyright infringement claim β€” partly because Getty itself acknowledged there was no evidence the training occurred in the UK β€” but found limited trademark infringement where Stable Diffusion outputs replicated Getty watermarks. Getty framed it as a win for IP owners; Stability AI framed it as a win for AI developers. The legal picture remains unsettled.

This OpenAI partnership is the constructive alternative to that fight: a major content owner getting paid to supply licensed, rights-cleared material, rather than watching its work get used for free. Getty already struck a similar deal with AI search engine Perplexity. The OpenAI agreement plugs it into a far larger audience and could turn its archive into a recurring AI-era revenue stream β€” though because financial terms are undisclosed, nobody yet knows whether this is a flat fee, usage-based licensing, a revenue share, or something else entirely.

The merger context

The OpenAI deal also lands against a significant corporate backdrop. Getty and Shutterstock announced a $3.7 billion merger of equals in January 2025, partly because generative AI had put pressure on both companies' core stock-photo businesses. The US Department of Justice cleared the deal without conditions in February 2026. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority conditionally cleared it in May 2026, requiring Shutterstock to divest its global editorial business to address competition concerns in the UK market. Final undertakings are still being finalized. The OpenAI deal strengthens Getty's negotiating position and standalone value at a moment when the merger's ultimate shape is still being worked out.

What to watch

  • Financial terms: The companies may share more detail on the revenue structure over time. Any specifics on per-image fees, minimum guarantees, or revenue sharing would significantly sharpen the investment case β€” and the valuation.
  • Getty's next earnings report: Watch for any early signals on revenue contribution from the OpenAI deal. Q1 results were weak across the board; the deal needs to show up in the numbers to sustain investor confidence.
  • Display vs. training rights: The broader AI copyright debate is moving fast. Watch whether Getty's display deal expands into broader licensing β€” or stays limited to how images appear in ChatGPT responses.
  • Shutterstock merger completion: The CMA's divestiture requirement still needs a buyer for Shutterstock's editorial business. Progress there will shape what the combined company actually looks like.

The bottom line

Getty Images engineered one of the more dramatic single-day reversals of the year, transforming itself in investors' eyes from a struggling, near-delisted content company into an AI-adjacent winner. The deal marks a real milestone in the shift from AI companies taking content toward paying for it.

But this could be transformative β€” the announcement doesn't yet prove it. Whether the stock move holds will depend on dollars that neither company has disclosed, a merger that isn't finished, and a legal landscape around AI and copyright that no court has fully settled.

Sources