xAI sues Minnesota to block AI nudification law

Elon Musk’s xAI filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota seeking to halt HF 1606, a state law that targets AI-generated images that remove or alter clothing on real people. The law is scheduled to take effect Aug. 1 and carries civil penalties up to $500,000 per image.

The complaint argues HF 1606 creates strict, content-based liability for platforms and tools that can produce realistic images of real people showing body parts those people never exposed. xAI says the statute imposes penalties regardless of a platform’s knowledge, intent or efforts to prevent such content, and that it offers no safe harbor for services that ban or filter nudification attempts.

The filing notes the statute adopts the term “intimate part” from a criminal sexual contact law, a definition xAI says was written for nonconsensual physical contact, not image generation. The complaint contends the wording could cover images such as a shirtless politician, a person in a swimsuit or a beach photo used for satire, and that liability would attach even if the depicted person consented, created the image themselves, or the image is never shared.

xAI’s complaint acknowledges Minnesota’s interest in stopping nonconsensual nude deepfakes, writing that it “does not contest Minnesota’s interest in prohibiting the dissemination of artificially generated nude images of real people without their consent.” The company also describes actions it says it has taken since launching Grok image tools in July 2025, including suspending more than 50,000 accounts and filing over 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2026, which it says led to at least 244 arrests.

Minnesota enacted HF 1606 with overwhelming bipartisan votes, passing 132-1 in the House and 65-0 in the Senate after a case in which a man used social media photos to generate sexual images of more than 80 women. The bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, confirmed the law’s ban on consensual images was intentional, a point the complaint highlights.

xAI contrasts HF 1606 with the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, which addresses nonconsensual intimate deepfakes but requires proof of nonconsent and actual distribution, uses a narrower definition of protected body parts, and includes carve-outs for education and medical content. xAI argues Minnesota’s law departs from that model by creating strict per-image penalties without similar exceptions.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison defended the law’s purpose, stating that “AI nudification robs the target of their dignity and can cause immense harm on an emotional, personal, and professional level.” xAI has asked a federal judge to block HF 1606 before it takes effect. The complaint frames the case as a test of whether states can impose strict liability and broad content limits on general-purpose AI creative tools; the court’s ruling could affect how other states regulate synthetic visual content.