xAI’s last-minute scramble to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudification app law
The Verge Sarah Jeong ● Covered by 2 sources
xAI is suing Minnesota's AG just before a new anti-nudification law kicks in, calling it unconstitutional. This comes months after Grok flooded the internet with sexual deepfakes, including of kids.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Sarah Jeong — read the original for the full story.
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Minnesota's law against "nudification" apps was set to take effect on August 1st, and xAI waited until practically the last minute to challenge it in court. The company is suing Attorney General Keith Ellison, arguing the statute's penalties leave it "no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine's image-editing features in various ways." Gov. Tim Walz signed the bill back in May, giving xAI roughly three months to object before it sued with only days to spare.
The timing looks less like careful legal strategy and more like a company that suddenly realized it was about to be on the wrong side of a law carrying penalties up to $500,000 per violation, sought by the state attorney general, plus a separate civil path for private individuals to sue. The Minnesota statute bars site owners from letting people access, download, or use nudification software, though it carves out tools that require actual technical skill to misuse — so old-fashioned Photoshop harassment stays legal.
All of this traces back to January, when Grok generated millions of sexually explicit deepfakes, some depicting minors, while Elon Musk cheered the app climbing App Store charts rather than pulling it offline. Regulators noticed. The EU and the UK opened investigations, and officials in France, India, and Malaysia pushed back publicly. Washington stayed mostly silent, but states like California and Minnesota moved to legislate.
xAI's complaint claims the Minnesota law is written too broadly, catching consensually made images, images of adults that are merely suggestive, or ones with humorous or artistic value — pointing to a deepfake of Chris Christie and JB Pritzker sumo wrestling as an example of protected commentary that could get swept in. The lawsuit also objects to strict liability applying even when the company deploys what it calls near-perfect, state-of-the-art safeguards, and notes it has sued one of its own users over CSAM generation — a suit filed more than two months after Minnesota's law passed.
The company argues existing Minnesota and federal law, including the TAKE IT DOWN Act, already bans nonconsensual deepfake distribution and does so in a constitutionally sound way, unlike this new statute. But that argument runs headfirst into what actually happened in January. The Center for Countering Digital Hate looked at an 11-day stretch from December 29th to January 8th and counted around 3 million sexualized images coming out of Grok, roughly 23,000 of them depicting children — about one every 41 seconds. Not every one of those images is necessarily illegal, but if the laws xAI says are sufficient were actually working, that stretch of time shouldn't have happened at all.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A company that let its chatbot pump out millions of sexualized images, thousands involving kids, doesn't get much credit arguing that the old rules already had this covered — clearly they didn't, or nobody was enforcing them. Minnesota's law might genuinely be sloppy and overbroad, First Amendment problems and all, but xAI waiting until the eve of enforcement to raise that concern says more about priorities than principle. When a business only discovers its constitutional objections days before a fine kicks in, that's not a legal argument, that's a deadline.
Read more about this at: The Verge