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 ...