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

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a law passed back in May that broadly targets “nudification” apps, claiming that the statute’s punitive provisions leave the company with “no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features in various ways.” The law, the company argues, violates the First Amendment.

Back in January, Grok flooded the internet with millions of sexually explicit deepfakes , including images of minors . In another era, a content moderation disaster 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, the chatbot was left to pump out pornographic images for days. “Grok now hitting #1 on the App Store in one country after another!” he posted in the midst of the deepfake epidemic.

Something had gone wrong. Was the law simply not up to the task of curbing an explosion of nonconsensual nudes? Governments around the world were asking fairly similar questions. The EU launched an investigation , as did the United Kingdom . There was backlash from French, Indian, and Malaysian government officials . And while the American federal government was noticeably quieter on the issue, blue states like California and Minnesota took a harder line.

In Minnesota, the state legislature passed a law targeting “nudification” technology, prohibiting site owners from allowing people to “access, download, or use” such software. (The law makes a carve-out for tech that “requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video” — so bespoke sexual harassment through Photoshop is in the clear.) The statute creates a civil cause of action for private individuals who may wish to sue, and also authorizes the state attorney general to seek penalties of up to $500,000 per violation.

The law, touted as the first of its kind, was signed by Gov. Tim Walz in May, and is meant to go into effect on August 1st. It’s a bit of a mystery as to why xAI did not file a lawsuit in the last three months, and instead sued just a couple of days before the statute went into effect. It’s the kind of delayed reaction that makes you wonder if someone at xAI suddenly noticed last week that they were about to be in violation of a fairly 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 are making an absolute killing.