Getty Images Sues Stability AI for Using Its Photos to Train AI Models

Getty Images accuses Stability AI of illegally using its content to train AI models in a high-stakes London trial. Stability AI calls the lawsuit an “overt threat” to the generative AI industry.

London’s High Court began hearing a major legal case on June 9, 2025, involving Getty Images and Stability AI. This highly anticipated trial, expected to last three weeks, is being called “the most significant case to reach the High Court” by leading intellectual property lawyers.

The Dispute

At the heart of the case is Getty Images’ accusation that Stability AI, a London-based developer of generative AI systems, illegally collected millions of Getty’s copyrighted images without permission, hence breaching copyright laws.

Getty, a prominent visual media company and stock photography licensor, alleges that Stability AI copied and altered content from its website, gathered via the LAION-5B dataset, which includes billions of image-text pairs scraped from various websites including Getty’s, to train its Stable Diffusion model. This model can create new, synthetic images based on user commands.

Getty points to Stability AI’s UK presence and English-language website as evidence of targeting UK users, arguing that Stability altered its content by adding noise and creating further copies during the decoding process for training, all without consent.

Additionally, Getty claims that not just images created by Stable Diffusion copied significant portions of their copyrighted content, these sometimes even displayed Getty’s watermarks. They also allege that if users provide Getty images as prompts, the AI’s output can be almost identical.

This landmark case extends beyond just copyright. Getty also alleges trademark infringement and database rights infringement. They claim Stability AI used Getty’s registered trademarks, “GETTY IMAGES” and “ISTOCK” in both the training data and the generated outputs.

Stability AI’s Counter Claims:

Stability admits using some Getty images for training but argues the training happened outside the UK. It denies infringement, stating that it didn’t use Getty’s trademarks in the course of trade and its generated images don’t use Getty’s copyrighted works, so, any similarities are accidental since users are responsible for any copying, not the platform itself.

Additionally, Getty’s claim that Stability AI unlawfully extracted and reused a significant portion of its database content for AI training, is challenged by questioning the validity of Getty’s asserted database rights.

Stability lawyer Hugo Cuddigan states that Getty’s lawsuit is “an overt threat” to its business and the broader generative AI industry. Its spokesperson claims that artists using their tools are creating works based on “collective human knowledge,” which aligns with “fair use and freedom of expression.”

However, Lindsay Lane, Getty Images’ lawyer, clarified that their case is not against technology but against the use of copyrighted works “without payment,” asserting that AI and creative industries can coexist.

Impact on AI and Creativity

This case has emerged at a time when creative industries are grappling with the implications of AI models trained on existing copyrighted material. Legal experts believe this case is expected to deliver one of the first substantive judgments in the global wave of AI-related intellectual property disputes.

Legal expert Iain Connor, an intellectual property partner at Michelmores LLP, shared his comment with Hackread.com, emphasizing the case’s importance in setting boundaries for copyright in the AI era.

“This is the most significant AI case to reach the English High Court. The legal community is waiting with bated breath to see how far the judgment will go to rule on the legality or otherwise of the use of AI models.”

“The case is much more nuanced than ‘big tech vs creative industries’ and the legal arguments are even more nuanced as one of the big issues to be determined is ‘where did the ingestion of information which allegedly infringes Getty Images take place?” added Iain.

“The judge may take the opportunity to rule widely on the lawfulness of AI’s use of ‘input materials” and whether “AI output” infringes third-party rights,” he explained. “Alternatively, the decision could be a damp squib and deal with the case on the narrow jurisdictional issue of where Stability AI trained its AI model which, if outside the UK, could leave us without a meaningful verdict.”