A Ruling About Timing, Not Text
On July 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI's request for a temporary restraining order against Minnesota's first-in-the-nation ban on AI "nudification" tools, letting the law take effect on schedule August 1. Read the order closely and it is not a ruling that the law is constitutional. It is a ruling that xAI moved too slowly to claim it was being irreparably harmed. Frank noted that xAI filed for emergency relief "on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect," adding that "such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate" (TechCrunch). Rather than dismiss the case, Frank converted xAI's motion into a request for a preliminary injunction, with a hearing set for August 19 in St. Paul (Engadget). That hearing, not the July 31 order, is where Minnesota's law will actually be tested on the merits.
Why Minnesota Moved First
The steelman case for the law is strong and grounded in a real pattern of harm. xAI's own Grok chatbot became a byword for the problem earlier this year, when users on X exploited it to generate sexualized images of real women and, in some documented cases, minors — conduct that has since produced a wave of separate litigation, including suits from Baltimore and individual plaintiffs alleging Grok was used to create sexual images of them without consent (TechCrunch). Against that backdrop, the Minnesota legislature's response — House File 1606, signed into law and codified as 2026 Session Law Chapter 72 — is not a speculative overreach; it is a direct answer to an identifiable harm. The statute bars any website or app owner from letting a user "nudify" an image or video, or from nudifying one on a user's behalf, and backs that prohibition with civil penalties of up to $500,000 per violation, enforceable by the state attorney general, plus a private right of action letting victims recover up to triple actual damages, punitive damages, and attorney fees (Minnesota Session Laws 2026, Ch. 72). It carves out tools that require genuine "technical skill" from a human user — aimed at protecting conventional editing software — while sweeping in automated nudification services. Sponsored by Rep. Jessica Hanson and Sen. Erin Maye Quade, it passed and was signed this spring, taking effect August 1 (Minnesota House of Representatives).
The Overbreadth Problem the Court Hasn't Reached
The weakness in Minnesota's approach is not its goal but its mechanism: strict liability with no knowledge or intent requirement, layered onto a definition of "intimate part" borrowed from the state's general criminal sexual conduct code rather than one tailored to nudification. Because that definition reaches areas like the inner thigh and covers self-generated or consensual images alongside nonconsensual ones, critics have pointed to plausible sweep well beyond the law's stated target — a South Park-style parody depicting a public figure nude, or someone using an editing tool to place themselves in a bikini, could each arguably trigger liability under the statute's text (Reason, Aug. 5, 2026). xAI's complaint characterizes the law as "an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression," and notes that it faces liability even where it has deployed filters and prohibitions against nonconsensual content but a user circumvents them (Engadget). A platform operator that builds real safeguards and still gets fined $500,000 per violation because a determined user evaded them is a predictable consequence of strict liability — and it is exactly the kind of chilling effect First Amendment doctrine exists to police.
A Less Restrictive Model Already Exists
Minnesota did not have to choose strict liability to get results. Congress addressed the same underlying harm through the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law in May 2025, which criminalizes nonconsensual intimate imagery — including AI-generated forgeries — while requiring covered platforms to build a notice-and-removal process rather than exposing them to strict per-image liability regardless of fault. That framework, built with the input of victim advocates and passed by near-unanimous bipartisan majorities, shows that lawmakers can protect victims without dispensing with a knowledge or notice element. Minnesota's law does something Congress's did not: it makes the platform strictly liable even when it has acted in good faith, which is a meaningfully more aggressive posture than the federal baseline requires.
What August 19 Should Settle
Minnesota was right to act on a genuine and well-documented harm, and Judge Frank was right that xAI's three-month delay undercut any claim of emergency. But neither of those facts resolves whether HF 1606's strict-liability, broadly worded structure can survive strict scrutiny once a court actually reaches the First Amendment question. Other states, including Texas and California, are moving on similar nudification bans, which makes getting the balance right in Minnesota's test case more than a local matter. The right outcome on August 19 is not for the court to strike the law down wholesale — the harm is real and the state's interest is compelling — but to press Minnesota toward the narrower, notice-based, knowledge-anchored model that Congress already built, rather than let strict liability stand unexamined simply because one company sued too late to stop it.