Minnesota's AI Nudification Ban Has xAI Seeing $500K Per Pixel—Grok Sues 🧾

xAI filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison seeking to invalidate HF 1606, the country's first statute targeting AI "nudification" software that digitally removes or alters clothing in real photographs of real people. The complaint was lodged in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota and argues the measure is "an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit nudification." Minnesota's legislature passed HF 1606 by a 132-1 vote in the House and 65-0 in the Senate, following a case in which a man used social media images to generate sexual depictions of more than 80 women he knew. Under the law, any platform is strictly liable for user-generated realistic images of real people showing body parts those individuals never exposed, with penalties of up to $500,000 per image.

xAI does not dispute the state's underlying goal. "xAI accordingly does not contest Minnesota's interest in prohibiting the dissemination of artificially generated nude images of real people without their consent," the filing states. "But the statute Minnesota enacted extends far beyond that goal, exposing a wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanctions." The company argues the law's definition of "intimate part," borrowed from a criminal sexual contact statute governing nonconsensual touching, sweeps in the inner thigh, buttocks, and breast as equivalents, exposing political satire, swimwear imagery, or beach photos of public figures to liability. The complaint adds that "there is no safe harbor for good-faith efforts of the provider of general-purpose AI creative tools to avoid harms," and that liability attaches even when depicted persons consented, created the image themselves, or the image is never shared. No scienter, or knowledge of wrongdoing, is required.

The dispute lands against a turbulent backdrop for Grok's image-generation tools, which debuted in late July 2025 and quickly produced deepfakes from simple text prompts, drawing regulatory scrutiny in Europe, Australia, and several U.S. states. The cities of Baltimore and three Tennessee minors have separately sued xAI over Grok's outputs, and the company previously challenged Colorado's AI law in April on similar First Amendment grounds. xAI also reports suspending more than 50,000 accounts in 2026 and filing more than 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, actions linked to at least 244 arrests, none of which the company says create a defense under HF 1606. Ellison's office had not publicly responded to the suit as of press time.