Getty Images terminated its planned merger with Shutterstock on June 30, 2026, walking away from a deal that had cleared the US Department of Justice but could not survive continued scrutiny from the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

The two stock-media giants had signed the merger agreement on January 6, 2025, with Craig Peters, then CEO of Getty Images, slated to lead the combined company 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 emerged almost immediately. The US Department of Justice issued a Second Request in April 2025 — a formal demand for additional documents and data that signals serious competition concerns and typically delays deals by six months or longer. 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 deep-dive process reserved for deals where the initial assessment raises concerns that competition may be substantially harmed. Phase 2 includes an independent panel, formal discussions about potential remedies, and can run 24 weeks or beyond. For a deal combining two of the three largest commercial stock-image libraries, the CMA's concern was straightforward: the merged entity would control an outsized share of commercially licensable photography, with Getty's iStock platform and Shutterstock's own library eliminating a major source of price competition between them.

Getty Images terminated the deal before Phase 2 concluded, according to Reuters.

The merger was conceived in a market already under structural pressure. Generative AI has made it far easier to produce synthetic images at scale, shrinking the addressable market for traditional licensed photography — much as desktop publishing compressed demand for professional typesetters in the early 1990s. A Getty-Shutterstock combination offered defensive logic: pooling contributor networks, metadata systems, and enterprise licensing relationships to build a platform large enough to compete against AI-native image generators. That strategic rationale does not vanish because the deal fell through.

Both companies have positioned themselves separately on the AI front. Getty signed licensing agreements with generative AI developers and built its own commercially indemnified image generator. Shutterstock inked similar data-licensing deals and launched AI generation tools. A merged entity would have had considerably more negotiating power over model developers seeking large, rights-cleared training datasets. Operating independently, each faces that negotiation from a weaker position.

The CMA's referral to Phase 2 reflects a broader stance among competition authorities in London, Brussels, and Washington: they are increasingly scrutinizing large-scale consolidation in markets where data concentration amplifies market power beyond what traditional revenue or headcount metrics alone reveal. A combined Getty-Shutterstock library would represent hundreds of millions of rights-managed images — an asset whose competitive value to AI developers is not captured by conventional market-share analysis. Whether the CMA would ultimately have blocked the deal or accepted structural remedies such as partial divestiture is now moot.

For observers tracking mergers in data-heavy sectors, this deal's trajectory carries a practical lesson. DOJ clearance, long treated as the primary gate for US-headquartered companies, no longer reliably signals that a transaction will close. The CMA has grown increasingly assertive on digital and data-market deals, and its Phase 2 process operates on its own timetable that neither party can compress. Companies planning large-scale consolidation in content, data, or AI-related markets should now build multi-jurisdictional review timescales explicitly into deal structure, including termination provisions calibrated to account for that variable.

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