Getty Images and Shutterstock, two of the biggest companies that sell stock photos and images to businesses, were planning to combine into one company. On June 30, 2026, they called off the deal. US regulators had already approved it, but UK regulators were raising serious questions, and the companies decided to walk away rather than fight on.

The two companies signed the merger agreement in January 2025, and Getty's CEO was slated to lead the combined business. Shutterstock's shareholders voted to approve it in June 2025, and both companies expected the deal to close by the end of that year.

But regulators got in the way. The US Justice Department demanded more documents and information in April 2025 — a sign they had real concerns about whether the deal would hurt competition. That process typically adds months to a deal's timeline. Eventually, in February 2026, US regulators gave their approval without conditions.

But that was not the end of it. UK regulators launched a deeper, more thorough review. They were worried that combining Getty and Shutterstock — two of the three largest companies in the stock-image business — would reduce the choices available to customers and could drive up prices. With both companies under one roof, there would be less competition between them. Getty already owned iStock, a major rival to Shutterstock, so merging would eliminate a key competitor.

The UK review was expected to take many months, and Getty and Shutterstock decided they could not wait. On June 30, 2026, Getty announced it was terminating the deal.

The real issue behind the merger is that artificial intelligence is changing the entire stock-image business. AI can now generate realistic pictures in seconds, for almost nothing, which means fewer people need to buy traditional licensed photos. It is similar to what happened to professional typesetters when desktop publishing software arrived in the 1990s — the job nearly disappeared.

Getty and Shutterstock were trying to combine forces to be strong enough to compete with AI. A bigger, merged company would have had more negotiating power when dealing with AI developers who want to use millions of images to train their systems. Now that they are staying separate, each company has less power in those negotiations.

UK and US regulators are increasingly worried about companies combining in industries that rely on data — like AI, where the value comes from controlling massive amounts of information. A merged Getty-Shutterstock would own hundreds of millions of images, which would give it outsized power in the AI market. Traditional measures of market size do not always capture why that matters.

The lesson for other large companies: regulators in different countries may not always agree, and approval in one place does not mean you will get approval everywhere. Companies now need to plan for multi-country regulatory reviews and be ready for different outcomes in each jurisdiction.