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Budrul Chukrut | Sopa Images | Lightrocket via Getty Images

LONDON — Getty Images is spending millions of dollars to take on a “world of rhetoric” through its Stability AI suit, the photo licensing company’s boss Craig Peters says.

Peters told CNBC in an interview that both Stability AI — the U.K.-based startup best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion — and other AI labs are stealing copyright-protected material to train their AI models for commercial gain.

These firms, he said, are taking copyrighted material to develop their powerful AI models under the guise of innovation and then “just turning those services right back on existing commercial markets.”

“That’s disruption under the notion of ‘move fast and break things,’ and we believe that’s unfair competition,” Peters added. “We’re not against competition. There’s constant new competition coming in all the time from new technologies or just new companies. But that’s just unfair competition, that’s theft.”

Peters said the AI industry is making the argument that if developers are forced to pay for access to creative works, this will “kill innovation.”

“We’re battling a world of rhetoric,” the CEO told CNBC.

Getty is suing Stability AI in both the U.K. and U.S. over allegations that the company copied 12 million images without permission or compensation “to benefit Stability AI’s commercial interests and to the detriment of the content creators.” 

Stability AI has contested the legal action, saying it doesn’t consider Getty’s claims to have merit. The company acknowledges some images from Getty Images websites were used to train its Stable Diffusion model. However, the firm denies it’s liable in respect to any of the claims Getty has made.

Stability AI declined to comment on this story when contacted by CNBC.

The firm has previously argued its use of copyright-protected material online is sound under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of copyrighted material in certain circumstances — such as “transformative” uses that add new expression or meaning to original works.

‘Our case is very strong’

Technology startups like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral have flourished by taking vast amounts of data from the open web and using it to train their foundational AI models, which can produce lifelike texts, images and videos.

However, the strategies of these firms have raised concerns over their use of copyrighted material. Several lawsuits have targeted AI firms over alleged copyright infringements from The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI to several U.S. record labels’ claims against AI music generation services Suno and Udio.

Part of the reason Getty Images is pursuing legal action specifically against Stability AI and not other firms is because such legal pursuits are “extraordinarily expensive,” Peters added. “Even for a company like Getty Images, we can’t pursue all the infringements that happen in one week.”

“We can’t pursue it because the courts are just prohibitively expensive,” he said. “We are spending millions and millions of dollars in one court case.”

AI startups are being funded to the tune of several billions of dollars to develop their foundational models, with tech heavyweights like Microsoft, Google and Amazon ploughing cash into the field.

Nevertheless, Peters acknowledges that it’s not been an easy fight. “I think our case is very strong. But I’m going to caveat that: we had to file in the U.S. and the U.K., and to be candid, we didn’t know where this training took place,” he said.

“There are elements where we have to go through and then we’ve got to spend money for due diligence, and they resist and we’ve got to fight, and we go back and forth,” Peters added.

“The facts in aggregate at a global scale I think are absolutely in our favor. How they manifest themselves around the geographic and legal constructs that are there I think is still stuff that we’re going to have to continue to play out.”

The case is set for an initial trial to determine liability from June 9.

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CyberArk’s stock jumps on report Palo Alto Networks in talks to buy company for over $20 billion

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CyberArk's stock jumps on report Palo Alto Networks in talks to buy company for over  billion

Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, looks on during the closing bell at the Nasdaq Market in New York City, U.S., March 25, 2025.

Jeenah Moon | Reuters

CyberArk shares soared as much as 18% on Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that cybersecurity provider Palo Alto Networks has held discussions to buy the identity management software maker for over $20 billion.

Cloud security is becoming an increasingly critical piece of the enterprise tech stack, especially as rapid advancements in artificial intelligence bring with them a whole new set of threats, and as ransomware attacks become more commonplace.

Founded in 2005, Palo Alto Networks has emerged in recent years as a consolidator in the cybersecurity industry and has grown into the biggest player in the space by market cap, with a valuation of over $130 billion. CEO Nikesh Arora, who was appointed to the job in 2018, has been on a spending spree, snapping up Protect AI in a deal that closed in July, and in 2023 buying Talon Cyber Security, Dig Security and Zycada Networks.

But CyberArk would represent by far Arora’s biggest bet yet. The Israeli company, which went public in 2014, provides technology that helps companies streamline the process of logging on to applications for employees.

CyberArk faces competition from Microsoft, Okta and IBM‘s HashiCorp. Another rival, SailPoint, returned to the public markets in February.

With Tuesday’s rally, CyberArk shares climbed to a record, surpassing their prior all-time high reached in February. The stock is up 29% this year, pushing the company’s market cap to almost $21 billion, after jumping 52% in 2024. Palo Alto shares, meanwhile, slid 3.5% on the report and are now up about 9% for the year.

Representatives from Palo Alto Networks and CyberArk declined to comment.

During the first quarter, CyberArk generated around $11.5 million in net income on around $318 million in revenue, which was up 43% from a year earlier.

It’s been an active stretch for big deals in the cyber market. Google said in March that it was spending $32 billion on Wiz, its largest acquisition on record by far, and a purchase intended to bolster its cloud business with greater AI security technology.

Networking giant Cisco also made its biggest deal ever in the security space, buying Splunk in 2023 for $28 billion. Splunk’s technology helps businesses monitor and analyze their data to minimize the risk of hacks and resolve technical issues faster.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report

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Spotify stock falls on revenue miss, lackluster guidance

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Spotify stock falls on revenue miss, lackluster guidance

Thomas Fuller | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Spotify shares dropped about 4% Tuesday after the music streaming platform fell short of Wall Street’s expectations and posted weak guidance for the current quarter.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

  • Loss: Loss of .42 euros vs earnings of 1.90 euros per share expected
  • Revenue: 4.19 billion euros vs. 4.26 billion expected

The Sweden-based music platform’s revenues rose 10% from about 3.81 billion euros in the year-ago period. The company posted a net loss of 86 million euros, or a loss of .42 euros per share, down from net income of 225 million euros, or 1.10 euros per share a year ago.

Third-quarter guidance came up short of Wall Street’s forecast.

The company expects revenues to reach 4.2 billion euros, compared to a 4.47 billion euro estimate from StreetAccount. Spotify said the forecast accounts for a 490-basis-point headwind due to foreign exchange rates.

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Monthly active users on the platform jumped 11% to 696 million, while paying subscribers rose 12% from a year ago to 276 million.

For the current quarter, Spotify said it expects to reach 710 million monthly active users, with 14 million net adds. The company expects 5 million net new premium subscribers in the third quarter to reach 281 million subscriptions.

During the period, Spotify said it rolled out a request feature for its artificial intelligence DJ. The company said engagement with the offering has roughly doubled over the last year.

In 2024, Spotify posted its first full year of profitability. Shares are up 57% this year.

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Samsung backs South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions ahead of IPO

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Samsung backs South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions ahead of IPO

The Rebel-Quad is the second-generation product from Rebellions and is made up of four Rebel AI chips. Rebellions, a South Korean firm, is looking to rival companies like Nvidia in AI chips.

Rebellions

South Korean artificial intelligence chip startup Rebellions has raised money from tech giant Samsung and is targeting a funding round of up to $200 million ahead of a public listing, the company’s management told CNBC on Tuesday.

Last year, Rebellions merged with another startup in South Korea called Sapeon, creating a firm that is being positioned as one of the country’s promising rivals to Nvidia.

Rebellions is currently raising money and is targeting funding of between $150 million and $200 million, Sungkyue Shin, chief financial officer of the startup, told CNBC on Tuesday.

Samsung’s investment in Rebellions last week was part of that, Shin said, though he declined to say how much the tech giant poured in.

Since its founding in 2020, Rebellions has raised $220 million, Shin added.

The current funding round is ongoing and Shin said Rebellions is talking to its current investors as well as investors in Korea and globally to participate in the capital raise. Rebellions has some big investors, including South Korean chip giant SK Hynix, telecommunication firms SK Telecom and Korea Telecom, and Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco.

AI chip startup Rebellions looks to raise up to $200 million ahead of IPO

Rebellions was last valued at $1 billion. Shin said the current round of funding would push the valuation over $1 billion but declined to give specific figure.

Rebellions is aiming for an initial public offering once this funding round has closed.

“Our master plan is going public,” Shin said.

Rebellions designs chips that are focused on AI inferencing rather than training. Inferencing is when a pre-trained AI model interprets live data to come up with a result, much like the answers that are produced by popular chatbots.

With the backing of major South Korean firms and investors, Rebellions is hoping to make a global play where it will look to challenge Nvidia and AMD as well as a slew of other startups in the inferencing space.

Samsung collaboration

Rebellions has been working with Samsung to bring its second-generation chip, Rebel, to market. Samsung owns a chip manufacturing business, also known as foundry. Four Rebel chips are put together to make the Rebel-Quad, the product that Rebellions will eventually sell. A Rebellions spokesperson said the chip will be launched later this year.

The funding will partly go toward Rebellions’ product development. Rebellions is currently testing its chip which will eventually be produced on a larger scale by Samsung.

“Initial results have been very promising,” Sunghyun Park, CEO of Rebellions, told CNBC on Tuesday.

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Park said Samsung invested in Rebellions partly because of the the good results that the chip has so far produced.

Samsung is manufacturing Rebellions’ semiconductor using its 4 nanometer process, which is among the leading-edge chipmaking nodes. For comparison, Nvidia’s current Blackwell chips use the 4 nanometer process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Rebellions will also use Samsung’s high bandwidth memory, known as HBM3e. This type of memory is stacked and is required to handle large data processing loads.

That could turn out to be a strategic win for Samsung, which is a very distant second to TSMC in terms of market share in the foundry business. Samsung has been looking to boost its chipmaking division. Samsung Electronics recently entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to Tesla.

If Rebellions manages to find a large customer base, this could give Samsung a major customer for its foundry business.

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