Shutterstock Announces Major Expansion of Licensed Training Datasets to Power the Next Generation of Generative AI

NEW YORK, March 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK), a family of brands delivering scalable creative and GenAI solutions to help customers fuel great work, today announced that it is accelerating the future of generative AI with a major expansion of its training datasets. This expansion provides developers, researchers, and enterprise partners with unprecedented access to multimodal data high-quality licensed content for the full model training lifecycle, marking the next phase in Shutterstock's rapidly growing data licensing business.

"Generative AI models are not static; they must be continuously trained and refined to remain relevant, competitive, and accurate," said Daniel Mandell, Senior Vice President of Data Licensing and AI at Shutterstock. "While compute power often dominates headlines, it is high-quality, diverse, and rights-cleared data that fuels a model's ability to evolve and perform in a rapidly changing world. A continuous flow of fresh data has become as essential to AI infrastructure and ongoing retraining pipelines as compute power itself."

Already recognized for its extensive library of images, video, audio, and 3D content, Shutterstock has become a strategic AI partner and critical enabler of enterprise AI innovation, powering systems built by some of the world's largest technology companies, including OpenAI. Shutterstock also supports global brands and startups like Black Forest Labs and Runway, as well as AI research and product companies, like ElevenLabs, that rely on high-quality data to power discovery, personalization, and content experiences at scale.

Its expanded data catalog now features a growing range of assets—

—giving developers even greater depth and diversity of training material to power the next generation of generative models. New categories and content types are continuously being added to meet the evolving needs of model builders worldwide.

This expansion reflects the accelerating demand for high-quality training data as generative AI development reaches critical mass globally. By broadening access to rights-cleared, high-quality content across new formats and categories, Shutterstock is meeting the growing need while upholding the standards of transparency and data integrity and compliance that define its approach to AI. As developers seek richer, more diverse training materials to refine and evolve their models, Shutterstock continues to bridge the worlds of creativity and technology, empowering developers and enterprises to build smarter, more capable AI systems.

"The demand for high-quality, diverse data has never been greater," added Mandell. "As generative AI evolves, the performance and reliability of every model depend on the integrity of the data behind it. This expansion strengthens Shutterstock's position as the most trusted source of multimodal data, rights-cleared content, and long-term AI lifecycle partnership for AI development and ensures our partners have the breadth, depth, and quality they need to push the boundaries of innovation."

Shutterstock's platform, powered by its scale, curation expertise, and global contributor network, is uniquely positioned to meet growing demand. The company continues to invest in data structuring, labeling, rights management, training orchestration, and MLOps deployment and monitoring to ensure its content is both rights-cleared and technically optimized for AI development.

To support the full spectrum of AI innovation, Shutterstock offers both research and commercial data licensing options. Researchers and startups can begin with a research license to explore, experiment, and validate models before transitioning to a commercial license for scaled deployment. With this expansion, innovators gain access to even more high-quality content to power discovery, iteration, and real-world application.

This announcement follows Shutterstock's recent launch of its AI Services offering, which deepened the company's role in end-to-end model training and evaluation for global partners. Together, these initiatives reflect Shutterstock's end-to-end approach to enabling generative AI development, from foundational data access to full-scale solutions that accelerate innovation.

Shutterstock is an end-to-end AI model training partner that unifies data licensing, services, and long-term collaboration under a single provider—reducing operational complexity and helping teams bring higher-performing AI systems to market faster and with greater confidence. Shutterstock combines access to one of the world's largest rights-cleared multimodal datasets with advanced data curation and custom training datasets to power high-performing, deployment-ready generative models. This licensable training data includes high-quality labeled and continuously updated multimodal content with clear data provenance to support AI compliance. Shutterstock leverages ML-assisted evaluation tools to provide model training, fine-tuning, alignment, evaluation, and retraining. Through human-in-the-loop workflows, expert creative feedback, and structured preference data, Shutterstock delivers aesthetic preference signals, benchmarking, and regression testing to drive continuous model improvement.

Learn more and start the conversation at shutterstock.com/data-licensing

Shutterstock is in the business of turning ideas into impact. Powered by a global network of millions of creators and our cutting-edge technology, we provide businesses, creatives, and brand leaders with the essential, universal ingredients to make their work more effective. Shutterstock offers access to one of the world's largest and most diverse collections of high-quality licensable assets, specialized training datasets, evaluation tools, and end-to-end strategic partnerships for the full model training lifecycle, as well as advertising and distribution solutions, exclusive editorial content, and full-service studio production—delivering unparalleled resources to fuel great work.

SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc.