Judge denies xAI’s bid to block Minnesota’s ban on nudify apps

A federal judge has refused to stop Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation ban on nudification apps from taking effect, denying xAI’s emergency request for a temporary restraining order. Senior US District Judge Donovan Frank ruled that xAI had not shown the law would cause it irreparable harm. The decision clears the way for the ban to land on Saturday, carrying civil penalties of up to $500,000 per violation.

xAI, now owned by SpaceX, sued Minnesota’s attorney general on July 29 to strike down the law on First Amendment grounds. It called the statute “an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression,” arguing it would force Grok to strip back its image-editing features. The company waited nearly three months after the law was signed to file the challenge.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed the bill on May 6 after it passed the state House 132 to one and the Senate 65 to zero. The law bars any site or app from letting users generate realistic fake nude images of a real, identifiable person. It is the first US state to ban nudification technology outright.

The ruling is a narrow procedural loss for xAI, not a final judgment on the merits. A hearing on a preliminary injunction is scheduled for August 19, where the company will have another chance to argue the law should be suspended while the case proceeds. But the immediate effect is that the ban takes hold this weekend with no court order blocking it.

xAI makes an awkward plaintiff. The company faces a proposed class action alleging that users turned Grok into the most prolific source of AI-generated child sexual abuse material on the internet. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that Grok produced roughly three million sexualised images in late 2025 and early 2026, including around 23,000 that appeared to depict children.

The company has tried to distance itself from that record. It restricted Grok’s image generation to paid subscribers in January, rolled out a broader crackdown on explicit outputs days later, and in July sued one of its own users for allegedly generating child sexual abuse material. NBC News reported that Grok was still undressing people as recently as April, despite those changes.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was blunt in response to the ruling, saying there are “plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy” but that this is not one of them. Walz was sharper, calling xAI a “creep” and promising to see them in court.

The case is being watched well beyond Minnesota. A UK MP is suing xAI in the High Court over sexualised Grok-generated images of her, and regulators in California, the EU, and Ireland have all opened investigations into Grok’s outputs. The Trump administration has said it wants to challenge state AI laws and impose a single national framework, making Minnesota a test case for how far one state can go in regulating AI on its own.

xAI’s core legal argument, that the First Amendment protects the tools of image generation even when those tools are used to undress real people, remains untested on the merits. The August 19 hearing will be the next chance for a federal court to weigh in. For now, the law stands.