Getty drops copyright allegations in UK lawsuit against Stability AI
[June 26, 2025] By
KELVIN CHAN
LONDON (AP) — Getty Images dropped copyright infringement allegations
from its lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI as
closing arguments began Wednesday in the landmark case at Britain's High
Court.
Seattle-based Getty's decision to abandon the copyright claim removes a
key part of its lawsuit against Stability AI, which owns a popular AI
image-making tool called Stable Diffusion. The two have been facing off
in a widely watched court case that could have implications for the
creative and technology industries.
Tech companies have been training their AI systems on vast troves of
writings and images available online. Getty was among the first to
challenge those practices with copyright infringement lawsuits in the
United States and the United Kingdom in early 2023.
Getty's trial evidence sought to show the painstaking creative work of
professional photographers who made the images found in Getty's
collection, from a Caribbean beach scene to celebrity shots of actor
Donald Glover at an awards show and Kurt Cobain smoking a cigarette. It
juxtaposed those real photographs with Stability's AI-generated outputs.
But it was a hard case to make in the U.K., in part because of a
technicality. Stability, though based in London, did its AI training
elsewhere on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon.
“It was always anticipated to be challenging to prove that connection to
the U.K. because we know that most of the training happened in the
U.S.,” said AI legal expert Alex Shandro, who observed the trial for the
law firm A&O Shearman.
Getty's abandoning of the key infringement claim in its U.K. case marks
the second legal setback this week for creative industries attempting to
challenge the generative AI industry's business practices.
In the U.S., a federal judge in California found that San
Francisco-based Anthropic didn't break the law for training its chatbot
Claude on millions of copyrighted books, but the company will still face
a trial for taking those books from pirate websites instead of buying
them.
In its U.K. lawsuit, Getty alleged that Stability's use of its images
infringed its intellectual property rights, including copyright,
trademark and database rights.
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 However, Getty's move indicates that
the company didn't think its copyright allegations would succeed.
After witness and expert testimony, Getty made the
“pragmatic decision to pursue only the claims for trade mark
infringement, passing off and secondary infringement of copyright,”
according to a written copy of its closing arguments.
Getty continues to accuse Stability of infringing its trademark
because its AI model was trained on images that included Getty's
watermarks, which were sometimes reproduced by the image generator.
Getty also alleges that Stability indirectly infringed its copyright
because even if Stability's AI models were trained outside of
Britain, it still faces local laws if the models produced images in
the country.
Shandro said removing that part of its U.K. complaint might also be
a strategic decision by Getty to focus on a similar copyright claim
that's still pending in a U.S. court.
London-based Stability said it welcomed Getty's move.
“We are pleased to see Getty’s decision to drop multiple claims
after the conclusion of testimony,” the company said in a statement.
"We are grateful for the time and effort the U.K. court has put
forth to address the important matters in this case. We look forward
to the court’s final judgment.”
Closing arguments are expected to last until the end of the week. A
written decision from the judge is expected at a later date.
How the judge addresses the remaining claims could be significant
because they go to the heart of how the U.K. handles the
distribution of AI tools that might have been lawfully trained in
the U.S., said Nina O’Sullivan, a partner at British law firm
Mishcon de Reya.
——
AP Technology Writer Matt O'Brien contributed to this report from
Providence, Rhode Island.
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