Judge denies xAI’s request to block Minnesota ban on ‘nudify’ apps

Minnesota's ban on apps that digitally strip clothes from photos without consent officially took effect August 1, and xAI's attempt to stop it fell flat. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied the company's request for a temporary restraining order, and his reasoning had less to do with the law's merits than with xAI's timing.

The law was signed back in the spring, but xAI didn't file for emergency relief until July 29 — three days before the deadline and nearly three months after Governor's signature made the ban official. Frank wasn't buying the urgency. He wrote that waiting that long "suggests that harm is not immediate," a polite judicial way of saying: if this was really an emergency, you'd have acted like it.

This doesn't kill xAI's case. The lawsuit itself continues, and the company still argues the ban sweeps too broadly, insisting there are narrower ways to stop harmful uses of nudify tools without banning them outright as Minnesota's first-in-the-nation law does. But for now, the ban stands, and Minnesota becomes the first state to actually enforce restrictions on this category of AI image manipulation while the legal fight plays out in the background.

The context here matters. Earlier this year, X users exploited xAI's own Grok chatbot to generate and spread non-consensual sexualized images across the platform, triggering investigations and platform bans. X and xAI are now both folded into Musk's SpaceX orbit, which makes the company's objection to a law targeting exactly this kind of abuse look like more than an abstract free-speech argument — it looks personal.