Minnesota passed the first state law in the country banning nudification technology. The vote was 197-1 combined across both chambers. xAI is suing to stop it two days before it takes effect.
The company, now folded into SpaceX under the name SpaceXAI, filed suit against Attorney General Keith Ellison on Monday. Its lawyers argue the statute reaches far beyond its stated target and criminalizes ordinary photo editing. The complaint offers a specific hypothetical: someone using Grok Imagine to animate or restore an old family photograph could trip the same wire as someone generating nonconsensual sexual images. The law imposes strict liability. It carves out no exception for tools that already prohibit the abusive use case.
The Law xAI Doesn’t Actually Object To
xAI’s complaint concedes the obvious point. The company says it does not quarrel with banning the distribution of AI-generated nude images made without consent. Grok’s own terms of service already forbid it. The real objection targets how the law defines “intimate part.” xAI’s lawyers argue Minnesota borrowed that language from an unrelated statute about physical touching instead of building a sensible visual standard, and that the definition sweeps in things like a person’s inner thigh.
State Sen. Erin Maye Quade built the bill, HF 1606, after learning a man had used social media photos to generate sexualized images and videos of more than 80 women he knew, without their consent. She compared the law to older statutes against secretly photographing people through windows. That framing carried it through the House 132-1 and the Senate 65-0.
The Money Is the Real Threat
Buried in the filing is the number that explains why xAI moved before Saturday’s effective date. Penalties tied to roughly 100,000 flagged images could expose the company to something in the neighborhood of $50 billion in liability. That’s not a rounding error. It’s an extinction-level figure, and it does most of the work behind xAI’s First Amendment argument that the statute is overbroad and content-based.
The timing makes the suit hard to read as principled free-speech advocacy in isolation. xAI is fighting a separate proposed class action from people who allege Grok’s chatbot and image generator produced child sexual abuse material from their real photos. That followed a viral incident over the winter holidays, when one estimate put the number of sexualized images of minors made through Grok at 23,000. xAI later pushed a moderation update to the tool and says it maintains zero tolerance for the abuse.
The complaint itself leans on Elon Musk’s own conduct on X, including posts built around AI-generated romantic content that xAI now cites as evidence its tools serve legitimate creative purposes, not just the unfiltered “spicy” outputs critics blame for the abuse.
Ellison isn’t backing down. He says nudification strips victims of their dignity and inflicts lasting emotional and professional harm. His office will respond once formally served.
What happens next in federal court will shape how every other state writes its own version of this law. Minnesota was first. It won’t be alone for long.
Related: How Does Grok Know Your Location? IP vs GPS Explained (2026)
