The Midjourney and Stability AI copyright cases, one year on: where they actually stand

Generative image AI’s copyright fights didn’t end with the first wave of artist lawsuits in 2023 — they escalated, and this year the plaintiffs got a lot bigger. In June 2025, Disney and NBCUniversal sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, after — according to reporting on the filing — Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter back in November 2024 and Universal followed in May 2025, with Midjourney reportedly sending only a brief receipt confirmation and no substantive response before the suit was filed, as detailed by Plagiarism Today’s coverage of the complaint. Warner Bros. Discovery joined the fight against Midjourney in September 2025, meaning three of Hollywood’s biggest studios are now aligned against a single 11-person-adjacent AI image company in one of the most closely watched AI copyright cases in the industry.

That case is still very much live. As of early July 2026, Midjourney is pushing back in discovery by seeking to reveal how the studios themselves use AI internally — a common defense-side tactic to complicate a plaintiff’s “we would never do this” framing. There’s no ruling yet on the merits; this is a case still being fought in the pretrial trenches more than eighteen months after the first cease-and-desist letter.

Meanwhile, in the UK: Getty’s case against Stability AI just got smaller

The other headline image-gen case — Getty Images v. Stability AI — took a real turn in mid-2025. At London’s High Court, Getty dropped its two primary copyright claims: that Stability trained Stable Diffusion on millions of Getty’s copyrighted images without permission, and that the model’s outputs reproduced substantial portions of those works (sometimes with Getty’s own watermark visible). Both claims were reportedly withdrawn after “weak evidence and a lack of knowledgeable witnesses from Stability AI” came up during testimony — not because Getty lost on the merits, but because it couldn’t make the case stick under UK jurisdiction. Getty is still pursuing secondary infringement and trademark claims in the UK. Stability AI’s response was characteristically understated: it said it was “pleased to see Getty’s decision to drop multiple claims after the conclusion of the testimony.”

That UK narrowing doesn’t touch Getty’s separate, much larger U.S. lawsuit against Stability AI, filed back in February 2023, which is still pending and seeks damages across more than 11,000 works — a case that, unlike the UK action, has not been trimmed.

What this means if you’re buying an image-gen tool

None of this litigation has produced a final ruling that changes how any of these tools operate today — Midjourney, Stability AI, and every other generator on Crail’s image generation AI category page are still shipping product while the cases play out, likely for years. But the shape of the disputes is now clear enough to act on: studios are targeting vendors that ship with the fewest guardrails around recognizable IP, and vendors with clearer training-data provenance (open licensing deals, opt-out programs, or fully licensed datasets) are a materially different legal risk profile for any team generating commercial creative at scale. If you’re evaluating vendors on that axis specifically, our Recraft vs. Black Forest Labs comparison is a useful starting point since both publish clearer terms around commercial usage rights than the vendors currently being sued.