Getty Images (US) Inc and others v Stability AI Limited was the first AI-training copyright case in England and Wales to reach a full trial. Mrs Justice Joanna Smith handed down judgment on November 4, 2025, with neutral citation [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), in the High Court of Justice, Business and Property Courts. Getty, a large commercial image licensor, had alleged that Stability AI infringed its rights by using Getty’s images to train the Stable Diffusion image generator and through the model’s outputs.
The case narrowed sharply before judgment. Getty accepted there was no evidence that the training and development of Stable Diffusion took place in the United Kingdom, and on that basis abandoned its primary copyright infringement and database-right claims, which depended on acts occurring in the UK. The court therefore did not decide the central question of whether scraping and training on copyrighted images is itself infringing - it proceeded on the basis that training had occurred outside the UK.
On the claims that remained, the court largely found for Stability AI. It dismissed Getty’s secondary copyright infringement claim, accepting the view that a model such as Stable Diffusion does not itself store or reproduce the training images - in the court’s analysis there are no copies of the relevant works inside the model weights imported into the UK. On the trademark claims, the court rejected the claim under section 10(3) of the Trade Marks Act but made what it described as “extremely limited” findings of infringement under sections 10(1) and (2), tied to early versions of Stable Diffusion that could reproduce Getty’s watermark.
Why business readers should care: this was the first UK trial to test AI-training copyright claims, and its most consequential feature is how little it ultimately decided. Because Getty dropped the territorial training claims, the judgment offered comfort to model developers on the narrow “are there copies inside the model” question while leaving the larger question of training-data scraping unresolved in the UK. It contrasts with the US cases - 2025-bartz-v-anthropic and 2023-nyt-v-openai - where courts have engaged the training question directly, underscoring that AI-copyright law is developing differently across jurisdictions.