I feel I need to start out posts like this by reminding anyone that nudification apps are bad. They’re almost exclusively used to abuse and harass people, most often women. That said, if you’re going to ban them legally, you can’t just say “nudification apps are illegal.” That’s not how the First Amendment works. And, yet, that’s what the state of Minnesota did earlier this year. The dreadfully bad drafting of the law was also bizarre, because a decade earlier the state had passed a much more carefully crafted anti-nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) law, which had gone through a constitutional challenge and survived.
That ruling laid out the conditions as to why the NCII law could survive strict scrutiny (necessary to avoid being found unconstitutional under the First Amendment). Notably, that included things like the law having careful, narrow definitions of what images violated the law, requirements that the sharing be done with knowledge, that the images be non-consensual, and that there were clear exemptions for non-illegal uses like images for medical reasons, journalism, or science.
So the state Supreme Court listed out all these factors which were necessary to make the NCII law abide by the First Amendment. And… the Minnesota legislature decided to… ignore every single one. The law in question is broadly written and applies to plenty of perfectly legal speech. It doesn’t even include requirements for the images to be non-consensual or that there be intent, which means that if you wanted to get any AI tool provider in trouble, you could literally tell it to make a nudified image of yourself, send it to Minnesota’s Attorney General, and technically the company (that simply did what you told it to do with an image of yourself) could face fines of up to $500,000 per use.
So, even as xAI’s Grok tool is being credibly accused of generating non-consensual nudified images of people (in some cases children), we thought that xAI made a reasonable filing to try to block the law from going into effect. Bizarrely, the judge rejected both the Temporary Restraining Order request and the Preliminary Injunction request in short order, but without ever considering the merits of the complaint.
Instead, the judge was laser focused on a single issue: the law was passed in May, and set to go into effect in August, but xAI… had waited until the end of July (nearly three months) to sue. That was effectively the entirety of the judge’s analysis, saying that if you wait too long (how long is too long is not explained) then you can’t have a law blocked, no matter what the merits.
Last week, however, the Eighth Circuit appeals court jumped in and put the law on hold. There’s no explanation. The entire order is literally:
Appellant’s motion for injunction pending appeal is granted.
So, Minnesota’s AG, Keith Ellison, cannot currently enforce the law against xAI, but the case is far from over. It would be nice if at least one court actually looked at the law and asked whether it’s constitutional… but we’ll have to wait on that.
It would also be nice if the Minnesota legislature actually chose to write its laws in a manner compatible with the First Amendment, which I sorta feel shouldn’t require me asking them to do so.
Of course, the cynical take I’ve now heard from multiple people is that the Minnesota legislature deliberately wrote this law badly to bait Elon into suing over it, so they can get all the headlines about how Elon is “suing to protect nudification apps” and to rile people up about the court “blocking” that law. I’ve seen some of that happening on social media, where people are (understandably, but wrongly in this case) quick to condemn Elon and his apps.
The author of the law, state Senator Erin Maye Quade’s statement on the Eighth Circuit ruling completely misses the point:
“This ruling is another devastating reminder of how little the safety of women and children mean to men with money and power. Minnesota is the only state that has cut off predators’ access to technology to commit AI-image sexual abuse — and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals just gave child predators their favorite tool back, with no legal reasoning in the ruling. Nudification technology is overwhelmingly used to sexually abuse women and create child sexual abuse material. Since Minnesota’s law passed in May 2026, at least four lawsuits have been filed by children and women accusing Elon Musk’s company of engaging in image-based sexual abuse.
“To Musk, his company and its users: it is still illegal to disseminate nonconsensual sexual deepfakes, and dissemination includes sending to one or more persons. Each and every time his company generates a sexual deepfake and disseminates it to a user, the company is breaking the law.”
The thing is, if Senator Maye Quade actually wanted to protect the safety of women and children from “men with money and power,” then why didn’t she follow the roadmap the Minnesota Supreme Court laid out for her regarding how to write a similar law that can pass strict scrutiny? Even her comment regarding the illegality of “nonconsensual sexual deepfakes” shows that she knows about the earlier NCII law and how it was deemed acceptable under the First Amendment. So why didn’t she follow the same path with this law? It’s a question Minnesota journalists should be asking.
But the simple reality here is that Minnesota wrote a really badly drafted law here, which undermines any actual effort to deal with the very real problem of how people use nudification apps for abuse and harassment. Write a law that’s almost certain to get tossed by the courts — as Maye Quade did here — and victims end up with nothing, while abusers get to point to a court ruling and claim the law is on their side.
Writing a thoughtful, careful law that targets the actual harms would take actual work. Writing a poorly drafted law to goad one of the country’s most hated individuals into suing over it to make him look like a creep in headlines that help the politicians is easy. One is politics. The other is actually legislating to help people. Whether by design or by sloppiness, Minnesota went with the politics.