Getty Images terminated its planned merger with Shutterstock on June 30, 2026, walking away from a deal that had survived a US Department of Justice review only to stall under continued scrutiny from the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

The two stock-media giants had signed an Agreement and Plan of Merger on January 6, 2025, with Craig Peters, then CEO of Getty Images, designated to lead the combined entity under the Getty Images name. Shutterstock stockholders voted to approve the transaction in June 2025, and the companies had publicly guided for a close in the second half of that year.

Regulatory friction complicated that timeline almost immediately. The US Department of Justice issued a Second Request in April 2025 — a formal demand for additional documents and data that signals substantive competition concerns and routinely extends deal timelines by six months or more. The parties worked through that process, and the DOJ ultimately granted unconditional antitrust clearance on February 23, 2026. That should have been the decisive hurdle cleared.

It was not. The UK CMA had separately referred the merger for a Phase 2 review, a designation reserved for cases where a Phase 1 assessment finds that a deal may substantially lessen competition. Phase 2 is a deep-dive process — independent panel, formal remedies discussions, statutory timetable that can run to 24 weeks or beyond. For a deal of this profile, where two of the three largest commercial stock-image libraries would be folding into one, the CMA's concern was structurally foreseeable: the combined library would hold an outsized share of commercially licensable editorial and creative imagery, with iStock (a Getty property) and Shutterstock's own platform eliminating a major axis of price competition.

Getty Images pulled the plug before that process concluded, according to Reuters, which reported the termination on June 30, 2026.

The broader context here is worth examining. The stock-imagery market was already under structural pressure before this merger was conceived. Generative AI has accelerated the ease with which synthetic visuals can be produced at scale, compressing the addressable market for traditional licensed photography in the same way that desktop publishing compressed demand for commercial typesetters in the early 1990s. The strategic logic of a Getty-Shutterstock combination was, in part, a defensive consolidation — pooling contributor networks, metadata infrastructure, and enterprise licensing relationships to build a platform large enough to compete against AI-native image generation at volume. That logic does not disappear because the merger did.

Both companies have been positioning individually on the AI front. Getty struck licensing agreements with generative AI developers and built its own commercially indemnified image generator. Shutterstock similarly inked data-licensing deals and launched AI generation tools. The merger would have created a single negotiating counterparty with considerably more leverage over model developers seeking large, rights-cleared training datasets. Operating as separate entities, each faces that negotiation from a weaker position.

The CMA's Phase 2 referral is consistent with a broader posture among competition regulators — in London, Brussels, and Washington — to scrutinize large-scale consolidation in markets where data concentration amplifies market power beyond what traditional revenue or headcount metrics capture. A combined Getty-Shutterstock library would represent hundreds of millions of rights-managed images, an asset whose value to AI developers is not reflected in conventional market-share analysis. Whether the CMA would ultimately have blocked the deal outright, or accepted structural remedies such as a partial divestiture, is now moot.

For practitioners tracking M&A in data-heavy sectors, the trajectory of this deal is instructive. DOJ clearance, once viewed as the primary gating event for US-headquartered companies, no longer reliably signals that a transaction will close. The CMA has been increasingly assertive on digital and data-market deals, and its Phase 2 process carries its own timetable that neither party can compress. Companies planning large-scale consolidation in content, data, or AI-adjacent markets should build that variable explicitly into deal structure — including termination provisions calibrated to multi-jurisdictional review timescales.

Getty Images and Shutterstock now return to competing independently in a market that has shifted materially since they first agreed to combine.