A federal judge denied xAI’s request to block Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation ban on AI nudification technology, clearing the way for the law to take effect August 1, 2026. Elon Musk’s AI com
A federal judge denied xAI’s request to block Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation ban on AI nudification technology, clearing the way for the law to take effect August 1, 2026. Elon Musk’s AI company had argued the statute violates the First Amendment; the court disagreed that the harm was urgent enough to justify pausing it.
Minnesota’s HF 1606 passed with near-unanimous support — 132-1 in the House, 65-0 in the Senate — and defines nudification as altering or generating an image or video to depict an intimate part not shown in an original, unaltered image of an identifiable person. It targets platform operators rather than individual users, with civil penalties reaching $500,000 per image. xAI sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on July 27, arguing the law is overbroad and imposes strict liability even when a company deploys near-perfect technical safeguards, according to NBC News’ reporting. The judge noted xAI waited nearly three months after the law was signed before filing, undercutting its claim of urgent harm.
The suit doesn’t dispute Minnesota’s underlying interest in banning nonconsensual nude image generation — xAI’s complaint explicitly acknowledges that goal as legitimate. Its argument is that the law’s definition of “intimate part,” borrowed from Minnesota’s criminal sexual contact statute, sweeps in far more than intended, potentially covering AI-generated images of shirtless men or people in swimsuits. xAI said it plans to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features for Minnesota users specifically because of the financial exposure the statute’s penalty structure creates.
Grok Imagine has faced sustained scrutiny for exactly the harm this law targets. After a December 2025 model update, the tool began generating sexualized deepfakes of real people at scale on user request. xAI’s own court filings disclosed it has suspended more than 50,000 accounts and made over 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2026 alone — a scale of enforcement action that suggests the underlying problem was substantial well before Minnesota’s law existed. The company is also separately defending a lawsuit from writer Ashley St. Clair, who alleges Grok continued generating explicit deepfakes of her as both a child and adult even after xAI told her it would stop.
Minnesota’s move follows a broader pattern of jurisdictions targeting nudification technology through different levers. In July, San Francisco’s city attorney sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google demanding they remove nudification apps from their app stores entirely — a distribution-channel approach rather than Minnesota’s direct statutory ban on the underlying service. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is defending the law, has said plainly that AI nudification robs victims of their dignity and causes serious emotional, personal, and professional harm.
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