xAI has a novel argument for why it should get to keep building tools that digitally undress people. The First Amendment.
Elon Musk’s AI company, now owned by SpaceX, sued Minnesota’s attorney general on Monday, CBS News first reported. It wants a federal court to strike down the first US law banning “nudification” technology. The law takes effect on Saturday.
The law
Minnesota’s HF 1606 bars any site or app from letting users “nudify” a real, identifiable person. That means generating a realistic fake showing intimate parts they never exposed. It also bans advertising such tools.
Each violation can draw a civil penalty of up to $500,000. The money funds services for victims of sexual assault and abuse. State Senator Erin Maye Quade drove the bill, after a man used social-media photos to make sexual images of more than 80 women he knew.
xAI’s case
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xAI calls the statute “an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression.” It says it does not contest Minnesota’s interest in stopping nonconsensual nude images. It argues the law sweeps up protected speech along with them.
The penalties, it warns, are ruinous. A service whose users made 100,000 banned images could face “an eye-popping $50 billion,” it told the court. xAI says it would have to strip back Grok Imagine’s editing features once the law lands, chilling speech that is legal today.
It also claims the law is so broad it could reach images of shirtless men or people in swimsuits. That reading is contestable. The statute exempts tools that require real “technical skill” from the user, and it leaves federal Section 230 protections intact.
An awkward plaintiff
xAI makes this free-speech case while under fire for the very harm the law targets. It faces a proposed class action alleging people used Grok to make child sexual abuse material from real photos. Regulators in California, the UK, the EU and Ireland have all opened investigations.
The company says it “strictly prohibits” nonconsensual sexual images, and has even sued its own users for evading its blockers. This is the same tool a UK MP says generated sexualised images of her. It also sits upstream of the nudify apps Europe is trying to ban.
There is a bigger fight behind this one. The Trump administration has said it will challenge state AI laws and wants a single national framework instead. Minnesota is becoming a test case for how far one state can regulate AI on its own. Its ban on prediction markets was also just blocked.
The state is not backing down. “There are plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy,” attorney general Keith Ellison said. “This is not one of them.” Governor Tim Walz was blunter: “See you in court, creep.”
