Elon Musk’s company, xAI, heads to federal court in St. Paul Wednesday morning as part of a lawsuit against Minnesota’s anti-nudification law.<\/p>\n
xAI is seeking a preliminary injunction against the law which makes it illegal to digitally alter non-nude images or videos to create realistic nude images without consent. That hearing gets underway at 9:30 Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n
Last month, a Minnesota judge rejected xAI’s motion for a restraining order ahead of the law taking effect on August 1.<\/p>\n
In a newly filed brief, Minnesota Attorney Keith Ellison argues xAI can’t block the law through a preliminary injunction, because the company hasn’t met the necessary standard of \u201cirreparable harm\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ellison goes on to argue the lawsuit wasn’t filed in a timely manner, and claims of First Amendment protection fall flat.<\/p>\n
\u201cX.AI is no more entitled to relief today than it was three weeks ago, and its claims for a preliminary injunction clearly fail,\u201d Attorney General Ellison said. \u201cI am proud to fiercely defend this bipartisan law and its intent to protect all Minnesotans \u2014 most especially our children \u2014 from the irreparable harms that nudification tools and technology pose.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the 38-page lawsuit, xAI \u2014 whose AI model chatbot and image generator Grok is available on the social media platform known as X, formerly Twitter, and elsewhere \u2014 said it does not contest the state’s interest in banning the distribution of AI-generated nude images of real people without their consent. But it said Minnesota’s law \u201cextends far beyond that goal,\u201d banning many constitutionally protected images and video and subjecting the company to a penalty of $500,000 per violation.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit argues there is no \u201csafe harbor\u201d provision for companies that make good-faith efforts to prevent such images from being created by users, and that it covers images that were consented to by the depicted person, or even created by that person.<\/p>\n
It also says the law\u2019s definition of \u201cintimate part\u201d is overly broad, covering body parts that are routinely displayed in public.<\/p>\n
In 2026, the Minnesota Legislature passed a law that bans commercial products \u2014 a \u201cwebsite, application, software, program\u201d or other service \u2014 from allowing users to take a real person\u2019s likeness and synthetically generate images of their intimate parts which the law defines as \u201cthe primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast.\u201d <\/p>\n
The penalty falls on the platform providing the product or tool, not on individual users. The Minnesota House of Representatives passed the bill<\/a> with a massive bipartisan majority of 132\u20131 and the Minnesota Senate passed it unanimously 65\u20130. <\/p>\n State laws over election deepfakes have had mixed results in courts. California’s law was blocked<\/a> over First Amendment speech protections. Minnesota’s law has thus far survived a 2025 court challenge<\/a> by Musk’s company.<\/p>\n The law is distinct from state and federal laws that outlaw deepfakes, AI-generated sexually explicit images of people without their consent. Those laws typically penalize the people who use the tools to make these images, not the makers of the tools themselves. The federal Take it Down Act, passed last year, also requires websites and apps to implement a process to remove those images.<\/p>\n Texas last year took on nudification in a slightly different way. It made a website or app owner liable to civil damages from a person depicted in a nudified image \u2014 and potentially criminal penalties \u2014 if the website or app owner knew the person hadn’t given consent to its creation or fails to take it down promptly when told about it.<\/p>\n In the lawsuit, xAI said the terms of service for using Grok prohibit using it for \u201cany illegal, harmful, or abusive activities” that violate someone’s privacy, including altering their image to nudify them or depict them in a sexually explicit image. It said it enforces those rules against violators through account suspensions or terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse content.<\/p>\n XAI also said earlier this year that it has \u201czero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.\u201d<\/p>\n