On Aug. 1, Minnesota's new law lets survivors sue the platforms that host AI apps generating nude images, the right to sue that 14+ other state deepfake laws don't offer.
When Molly Kelley, 43, of Otsego, Minnesota, learned in 2024 that her husband's best friend had used AI tools to generate pornographic images of her and roughly 85 other women, she was six months pregnant. She spent most of her maternity leave calling them, about 40 women, in hour-long conversations, to tell them what had been done with their photos.
On August 1, Minnesota becomes the first U.S. state to ban access to the technology that made that possible. The new law, House File 1606, does more than criminalize distributing AI-generated nude images without consent. It bans the apps and services that produce them in the first place, and it gives survivors something existing statutes do not: the right to sue the platforms that host those tools, and to sue anyone who advertises them.
That mechanism, an upstream prohibition paired with a private right of action against platforms, is what separates Minnesota's law from the patchwork of nonconsensual deepfake statutes in 14 or more other states and from the federal Take It Down Act signed earlier in 2026. Those regimes target distribution. Minnesota's targets the service.
Kelley said the distinction matters because of what distribution-only remedies miss. Take It Down Act, she told the Perham Focus, is "a downstream solution, and it's already been shared." Under Minnesota's existing 2023 deepfake statute, modeled on the state's nonconsensual intimate image law, she could not meet the "intentional dissemination" element because no one in her case had posted the images. The perpetrator had simply made them and shared them privately.
That gap is what HF 1606 closes. The law lets survivors sue platforms that make nudification tools available and sue anyone who advertises the technology. The state attorney general can collect fines up to $500,000 per violation. The prohibitions in the platform-access subdivision do not apply when a website or app requires "the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video," a carve-out that limits the statute's reach to consumer-facing services rather than local power users running open-source models on their own hardware.
The bill passed the Minnesota House as part of a tied-chamber bipartisan package that also addressed guns and fake cops. The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota supports HF 1606 as written, framing it as an access-to-technology prohibition rather than a speech or possession ban, a posture that distinguishes the law from earlier attempts to criminalize the images themselves.
Kelley's framing of her own experience doubles as a critique of how the wider debate has been named. She rejects the term "revenge porn," which she calls insulting because it implies her perpetrator hated her. "He would have sworn up and down that he loves me," she told the Perham Focus. "He would have sworn that we were family." Her objection is not stylistic. It is that distribution-only remedies built around the "revenge" frame assume a motive the law cannot prove, and leave out the women whose images were never posted at all.
What changes on August 1 is the address on the lawsuit. Before HF 1606, a Minnesota survivor's recourse ran through Minn. Stat. § 604.32, the civil cause of action for nonconsensual dissemination of a deep fake, and against the person who shared the image. After, it can run against the platform that made the image possible to generate, and against anyone who advertised the service that did. The watch item is enforcement: whether the attorney general's office uses the $500,000-per-violation authority, and whether the first private suits target consumer apps, advertised services, or both.