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.
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.
Last month, a Minnesota judge rejected xAI's motion for a restraining order ahead of the law taking effect on August 1.
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 “irreparable harm”.
Ellison goes on to argue the lawsuit wasn't filed in a timely manner, and claims of First Amendment protection fall flat.
“X.AI is no more entitled to relief today than it was three weeks ago, and its claims for a preliminary injunction clearly fail,” Attorney General Ellison said. “I am proud to fiercely defend this bipartisan law and its intent to protect all Minnesotans — most especially our children — from the irreparable harms that nudification tools and technology pose.”
In the 38-page lawsuit, xAI — whose AI model chatbot and image generator Grok is available on the social media platform known as X, formerly Twitter, and elsewhere — 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 “extends far beyond that goal,” banning many constitutionally protected images and video and subjecting the company to a penalty of $500,000 per violation.
The lawsuit argues there is no “safe harbor” 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.
It also says the law’s definition of “intimate part” is overly broad, covering body parts that are routinely displayed in public.
In 2026, the Minnesota Legislature passed a law that bans commercial products — a “website, application, software, program” or other service — from allowing users to take a real person’s likeness and synthetically generate images of their intimate parts which the law defines as “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast.”
The penalty falls on the platform providing the product or tool, not on individual users. The Minnesota House of Representatives passed the bill with a massive bipartisan majority of 132–1 and the Minnesota Senate passed it unanimously 65–0.
State laws over election deepfakes have had mixed results in courts. California's law was blocked over First Amendment speech protections. Minnesota's law has thus far survived a 2025 court challenge by Musk's company.
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.
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 — and potentially criminal penalties — 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.
In the lawsuit, xAI said the terms of service for using Grok prohibit using it for “any 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.
XAI also said earlier this year that it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”
After a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, Grok said in January it will geoblock content if it violates laws in a particular place, preventing people from editing photos of real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal. Grok’s “spicy mode” had allowed users to create explicit content, leading to a backlash from governments worldwide.
“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis, underwear and other revealing attire,” xAI said in a January statement.
(Associated Press writers Marc Levy and Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story)
