Elon Musk’s xAI sues Minnesota over its first-in-the-nation law banning ‘nudification’ technology

Elon Musk’s xAI company has sued Minnesota over the state’s first law banning “stripping” technology on websites and apps, potentially providing a test of how far states can go in constitutionally regulating the use of artificial intelligence.

Musk’s company filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court, days before the law takes effect Saturday and makes Minnesota the first state to try to ban the increasingly popular technology that allows people to use artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of real people. The law was signed into law in May.

In the 38-page lawsuit, xAI — whose prototype chatbot and image generator Grok is available on the social media platform known as But she said the Minnesota law “stretches well beyond that goal,” prohibiting many constitutionally protected photos and videos and exposing the company to a $500,000 fine for each violation.

The lawsuit says there is no “safe harbor” requirement for companies that make good faith efforts to prevent the creation of such images by users, and that it covers images that were approved by the person depicted, or were even created by that person.

She also says the law’s definition of “intimate part” is too broad, covering body parts that are routinely exposed in public.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement that his office had not yet been informed of or seen the lawsuit.

“But I know that using AI to produce nude images of people against their will is horrific,” Ellison said. “There are a lot of worthy discussions about AI policy. This is not one of them. AI nudity robs the target of their dignity and can cause tremendous emotional, personal, and professional harm.”

State laws on election deepfakes have had mixed results in courts. California law blocked First Amendment protection of speech. The Minnesota law has so far survived a lawsuit filed by Musk in 2025.

The law differs from state and federal laws that prohibit deepfakes, sexually explicit images created by artificial intelligence of people without their consent. These laws usually punish the people who use the tools to make these images, not the tool makers themselves. The federal Take it Down Act, passed last year, requires websites and apps to implement a process to remove those images.

Last year, Texas took stripping a little differently. It made the website or app owner liable for civil damages from a person photographed in a nude photo — and potentially criminal penalties — if the website or app owner knew that the person did not give consent to create it or failed to promptly remove it when told.

In the lawsuit, xAI said that Grok’s terms of service prohibit using it for “any illegal, harmful or offensive activities” that violate someone’s privacy, including altering their photo to show nudity or depicting them in a sexually explicit image. It said it enforces these rules against violators by suspending or terminating accounts, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse content.

XAI also said earlier this year that it has “zero tolerance for any form of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”

Following global backlash over sexual images of women and children, Grok said in January that it would geo-block content if it violated laws in a particular location, preventing people from editing images of real people in revealing clothing in places where it would be illegal. Grok’s “hot mode” allowed users to create explicit content, leading to backlash from governments around the world.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent Grok’s account from allowing the editing of photos of real people wearing revealing clothing such as bikinis, lingerie, and other revealing clothing,” xAI said in a statement in January.