xAI’s last-minute argument to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudification law

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a the order issued earlier in May which focuses on “nudification” programs, so to speak penal code leaving the company with “no practical choice but to stop Grok Imagine’s changes in various ways.” The law, the company says, violates the First Amendment.

Back in January, Grok flooded the internet millions of lies about sexincluding pictures of children. In one case, a the risk of reducing content of this magnitude would have had the CEO flipping the kill switch on the product within hours. But in Elon Musk’s brave new world, social media has been left to post pornographic images for days. “Grok is now hitting #1 on the App Store in many countries!” he wrote amid the deepfake epidemic.

Something had gone wrong. Wasn’t the law enough to prevent illegal genital mutilation? Governments around the world were asking similar questions. The EU initiated the process searchas he did United Kingdom. It was behind from the French, Indian, and Malaysian government officials. And although the federal government in America was calm on this issue, the blue says California and Minnesota took a hard line.

In Minnesota, the state legislature he issued an order to pursue “nudification” technology, preventing site owners from allowing people to “access, download, or use” these programs. (The law creates a technology that “requires the technical skill of the user to destroy a photo or video” – so photoshop abuse is obvious.) The law makes it possible for private parties to take action against individuals who want to be sued, and it also gives the attorney general the power to seek penalties of up to $0,000 each.

The law, which is known to be the first of its kind, was signed by Gov. Tim Walz in May, and it is supposed to start working on August 1st. It is a little unclear why xAI did not file a lawsuit three months ago, and instead filed a lawsuit a few days before the law went into effect. It’s the kind of delay that makes you wonder if someone at xAI suddenly realized last week that they were about to run afoul of a criminal law, and spent the next few days trying to find a law firm willing to work overtime on behalf of an inconsistent deepfake generator. One can only hope that the lawyers involved are absolutely killing it.

The complaint it’s pretty clear, all things considered. Minnesota’s law is too broad, it says, because it criminalizes even photos that are made casually, or photos of adults who are simply adulterous, or photos with “funny” or “artistic” content. The First Amendment says that laws must be narrowly drafted to avoid stifling moral and political commentary such as that of Chris Christie and JB Pritzker sumo wrestling.

“The lawsuit includes … even though the company has put in place the best, most advanced controls to prevent the release of nude images,” the lawsuit says with great conviction. Elsewhere, it complains about a standard case related to unauthorized user behavior – “images and videos that users can create in violation of Grok’s rules, which can be done by avoiding the technical controls, which xAI uses.”

“xAI takes its policy violations seriously,” the lawsuit said, indicating that the company sued one of Grok’s users to develop CSAM. (The lawsuit against the alleged creators of CSAM was filed two months after the Minnesota law was passed.)

The xAI lawyers may have a point, but their cases are like a misnomer from another country. They say, for example, that Minnesota’s federal laws (eg s FROM UNDER THE ACT) already prohibits the transmission of inappropriate genitalia. These laws, he argues, are written according to law – the nudification law, on the other hand, is not. And as with any law in America that targets speech based on its content, these laws should be written as loosely as possible while dealing with government “coercion.”

But that’s the main problem with Grok deepfake-ocalypse. If the existing law would have been able to work, the entire month of January 2026 would not be full of illegal porn. When a Center for Counting Digital Hate analyzed 11 times from December 29th to January 8th, they found that Grok had made about 3 million sexual images. About 23,000 of the photos were of children. The report said: “That’s an alarming rate of one child sex image every 41 seconds.

Most of the images may not be illegal. For example, it is not clear that deep penetration of a child in a bikini is CSAM, even one expert said earlier Seaside that some of Grok’s images – such as those showing children’s faces covered in semen – may have violated existing laws.

In any case, the mere fact that a multi-billion dollar company allowed Grok to run unsupervised for so long would indicate that the law was not encouraging the relevant parties to act responsibly. Maybe Minnesota The price of HF1606 it is a bad law. But what does this mean when the “good” rules don’t apply at all?