xAI makes last-minute scramble to stop Minnesota’s anti-nudity law

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for… The law was passed back in May Which is widely targeted at “nude” apps, claiming that Punitive provisions of the law The company was left with “no practical choice but to limit Grok Imagine’s image editing features in various ways.” The company says the law violates the First Amendment.

Back in January, Grok flooded the internet with Millions of sexually explicit deepfakesincluded Pictures of minors. In another era, A Content moderation disaster At this scale the CEO could have flipped the off switch on the product within hours. But in Elon Musk’s brave new world, a chatbot was left posting pornographic images for days. “Grok is now #1 on the App Store in country after country!” to publish In the midst of the deepfake epidemic.

Something went wrong. Wasn’t the law simply up to the task of limiting the spread of non-consensual nude photos? Governments around the world were asking somewhat similar questions. Launched by the European Union investigationas he did UK. There was a backlash from the French, Indians and Malaysians Government officials. While the US federal government has been noticeably quieter on the issue, blue states have exemplified it ca Minnesota took a tougher stance.

In Minnesota, the state legislature He issued a law It targets “scandalism” and prohibits site owners from allowing people to “access, download or use such software”. (The law makes an exception for technology that “requires the artistic skill of the user to expose a photo or video” — so detailed sexual harassment through Photoshop is obvious.) The law creates a civil cause of action for individuals who might want to sue, and also authorizes the state attorney general to seek penalties of up to $500,000 per violation.

The law, described as the first of its kind, was signed by Gov. Tim Walz in May and is scheduled to take effect on August 1. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why xAI hasn’t filed a lawsuit in the last three months, and instead filed a lawsuit just two days before the law went into effect. It’s this kind of delayed reaction that makes you wonder if someone at xAI suddenly noticed last week that they were about to violate a rather punitive law, and then spent the next few days trying to find a law firm willing to work overtime on behalf of a nonconsensual deepfake generator. One can only hope that the lawyers involved make an absolute killing spree.

the complaint Pretty reasonable, all things considered. He claims Minnesota’s law is too broad, because it imposes liability even on consensual images, adult images that are merely erotic, or images of “humorous” or “artistic” merit. The First Amendment states that laws must be narrowly written to avoid prohibiting social and political commentary like this deepfake of sumo wrestling by Chris Christie and J.B. Pritzker.

“Liability also lies…even if the company has deployed near-perfect and sophisticated technical controls to prevent the generation of nude images,” the lawsuit states with an excruciating degree of seriousness. Elsewhere, it bemoans the strict liability associated with its users’ unauthorized behavior — “photos and videos that users may be able to create in violation of Grok’s terms of service, which is only possible by evading the sophisticated, modern controls used by xAI.”

“xAI takes violations of its terms of service very seriously,” the lawsuit said, noting that the company It has since filed a lawsuit against one of its users for using Grok to create CSAM. (The lawsuit against the alleged CSAM maker was filed more than two months after the Minnesota law was passed.)

XAI’s lawyers may have a point, but their lawsuit sounds like a message from another planet. They claim, for example, that Minnesota law and existing federal law (such as Minnesota law). Take it law) already prohibits non-consensual posting of deep-dive nudes. Lawyers say that these laws are written in a constitutional manner, but the nudity law is not. As with any laws in America that target speech based on its content, these laws should be written in as non-restrictive a manner as possible while still addressing a “compelling” government interest.

But this of course is the crux of the problem with Grok deepfake-ocalypse. If current law were up to the task, the entire month of January 2026 wouldn’t be filled with non-consensual porn. when Center for Countering Digital Hate Analyzing the 11-day period from December 29 to January 8, she found that Grok produced about 3 million sexual images. About 23,000 of those images depict children. “This is a shocking rate, as a sexual image of a child appears every 41 seconds,” the report said.

Many of these images may not actually be illegal. For example, it is not clear whether a suggestive deepfake of a minor wearing a bikini is CSAM, Although one expert previously said Edge That other images created by Grok — such as those showing minors’ faces covered in semen — may have violated existing law.

Either way, the mere fact that a multibillion-dollar company allowed Grok to operate unchecked for so long suggests that the law was not incentivizing the parties involved to act in the right way. Maybe Minnesota HF1606 It is a bad law. But what does this mean when “good” laws are ineffective?