A new Minnesota law banning the use of technology that creates sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their consent will go into effect Saturday after a federal judge rejected the request of an Elon Musk AI company to delay the law’s enforcement.
U.S. District Court Judge Donovan Frank denied a request from xAI, which developed the Grok chatbot, to sign off on a temporary restraining order, citing the lawsuit’s timing.
“xAI filed the motion on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect,” Frank wrote. “Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate.”
xAI in its lawsuit requesting the judge to enjoin the law from being enforced argues that it is too broad as written and infringes on free speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
Minnesota’s evenly divided Legislature was the first in the country to enact — by wide, bipartisan margins — the ban on accessing or using nudification technology, which is becoming an increasing trend in school cyberbullying. Young girls have been targeted by deepfake, sexually explicit images depicting their likeness.
The law punishes AI platforms for letting users depict a person’s “intimate part” using nudification technology. It also imposes a $500,000 fine on the AI company each time a person uses the technology to generate or alter an image to make it sexually explicit.
xAI said in its lawsuit that it doesn’t take issue with Minnesota outlawing the “dissemination of artificially generated nude images of real people without their consent. But the statute Minnesota enacted extends far beyond that goal.”
In a filing, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said xAI’s lawsuit shows the company didn’t do its due diligence before filing to stop the law’s enforcement.
“xAI is a sophisticated and well-resourced litigant yet chose to wait until just a few days before Minnesota’s Nudification Ban effective date to bring this lawsuit. xAI’s lack of diligence and unreasonable delay confirms that a (temporary restraining order) is unnecessary,” Ellison wrote.
Frank ordered a hearing on Aug. 19 to discuss xAI’s motion for an injunction against the nudification law.
Originally published on minnesotareformer.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
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