Getty Images and Shutterstock announced their merger in January 2025. The logic was straightforward: two companies in the same shrinking business, combining to cut costs and present a bigger front against the rise of AI image generators. The US Department of Justice approved the deal without conditions in February 2026. The UK regulator did not.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority ran a full, in-depth review lasting over six months. Its conclusion: a combined Getty-Shutterstock would reduce competition in the UK market for editorial photography, meaning news photos, celebrity shots, and sports images. The regulator said UK media outlets would have fewer choices and would likely pay more. The fix it proposed was for Shutterstock to sell off its entire editorial operation globally, including agency brands like Rex Features, Splash News, and Backgrid.
Getty's board reviewed that condition and unanimously declined. Their position, stated in an SEC filing on June 30, 2026, was simple: they were not required to accept that condition under the terms of the merger agreement, and they chose not to. The deal terminates after July 6.
This outcome matters beyond Getty and Shutterstock. Any business planning a cross-border merger needs to understand that US regulatory approval does not guarantee the deal closes. The UK CMA has its own standards, its own timeline, and can impose conditions that make a deal economically pointless. The same dynamic is now playing out with Paramount's proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which the UK government flagged for review on the same day Getty pulled the plug.
Meanwhile, Getty did not wait for the merger dust to settle before finding a new direction. On June 21, it signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI. Licensed Getty photos now appear inside ChatGPT's search and discovery features. The deal is strictly about display: OpenAI shows the images to users, with attribution, but cannot feed them into AI model training. Getty had already signed a similar deal with the AI search tool Perplexity in October 2025.
The market's reaction was blunt. Before the OpenAI announcement, Getty's stock had fallen roughly 55% over the year, trading at 61 cents. After the announcement, shares jumped close to 200%. The stock had been so low that Getty faced a risk of being removed from the New York Stock Exchange for falling below listing requirements.
There is a clear strategic shift in how photo libraries are thinking about AI. Shutterstock had already licensed its images to OpenAI for training its DALL-E image generation model. Getty took a different path, first suing AI companies for using its photos without permission, then losing most of those claims in a UK court in November 2025, and now striking commercial deals that keep its photos visible but legally protected from being used to build competing AI tools.
For any business that buys stock photos regularly, the likely direction is higher prices over time and fewer independent suppliers. Getty's traditional creative licensing revenue fell 8% in Q1 2026. The revenue growth is coming from enterprise subscriptions, not one-off photo purchases. If you are a media company, a marketing team, or any operation that depends on licensed imagery, the supply side of that market just got smaller and more concentrated, regardless of whether the merger formally closed.