Stability AI, a London-based artificial intelligence company known for developing the image-generation tool Stable Diffusion, secured a major victory in the British High Court against Getty Images in a closely watched intellectual property case. Getty had accused the company of scraping 12 million images without permission to train its model, claiming both primary and secondary copyright infringement.
The court rejected these allegations, noting that Stable Diffusion does not “store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so).” During the June 2025 trial, Getty dropped its primary infringement claims, signaling doubts about their success, and instead focused on secondary infringement. The court dismissed those arguments as well.
Stability AI expressed satisfaction with the ruling, with General Counsel Christian Dowell stating, “This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue.” The judge upheld a limited portion of Getty’s trademark complaint, acknowledging that some images generated by the chatbot appeared with the Getty watermark, but emphasized that her findings were “historic and extremely limited in scope.”
Legal experts said the decision leaves key questions about AI training unresolved in the UK. Getty has not confirmed whether it will appeal and continues to pursue a separate lawsuit in the U.S., reflecting broader tensions between creative industries and the rapid adoption of generative AI technologies.
