Stability AI has stated in its latest company accounts that Getty Images is seeking up to $1.7bn in damages in a lawsuit alleging that the startup trained its image generation model on copyrighted works.
It marks an increase on the roughly $1bn that Stability said Getty was claiming for copyright infringements in its previous financial report, published in September.
The new document, filed last week, says that Getty is now seeking damages of up to $150k for 11,383 works in the suit, compared to the previously given figure of 7,300 images. Getty itself alleges that Stability may have wrongfully used as many as 12m images, which would equate to damages of $1.8tn.
Stability said in the filing that Getty hasn’t specified the total amount of requested damages.
AI companies across the globe are battling against a slew of lawsuits that allege they’ve scraped copyrighted data from the internet to train large language models (LLMs) or image generation tools. That includes a suit filed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp against Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity AI in October, a trio of authors suing Anthropic in August and the New York Times bringing a case against OpenAI and Microsoft late last year.
Stability AI is also facing a class action lawsuit alleging copyright violations by a number of artists.
“The Company does not consider that the claims in any of these matters have merit, and is contesting the claims in each of the cases,” Stability said in its accounts. The company declined to comment.
A rocky road
It’s been a chequered two years for Stability since it announced a $101m raise and unicorn status in October 2022.
In 2023, the company saw an exodus of talent which included 10 senior employees and its head of audio — who said he was resigning due to copyright concerns. It’s since pivoted its business model and saw further exec departures in 2024 — including founder and CEO Emad Mostaque in March — and made layoffs.
Stability AI announced that it had raised fresh funds in June, from investors including Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside ex-Facebook president Sean Parker and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The size of the round wasn’t disclosed but Sifted understands the company raised around $50m and was looking to raise an extra $30m from existing investors in July. The company hasn’t announced any funding updates since then.
Court case
US court records show that Getty amended its complaint to include 11,383 examples of copyright infringements in July. But it could be years before copyright lawsuits against AI companies make their way through the courts, with there being little legal precedent for companies training GenAI models on copyrighted content.
Google, however, did face a case with similarities in 2005 when a group of authors argued that the tech company had breached fair use when scanning and indexing their works. It took more than a decade for that case to conclude — in Google’s favour.
“All of the above cases are currently at an early stage in proceedings,” Stability said in its accounts. “Based on the current status of the cases…the company's management do not consider that there is any probable loss.”
Getty said in its court filings that the “case arises from Stability AI’s brazen infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a staggering scale”. Getty did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
