AIBRIEF
A federal judge refused to freeze the first US ban on apps that generate sexualized images of real people without consent, citing the 89 days xAI waited to sue.
A federal judge in Minnesota on Friday refused to freeze the state's first-in-the-nation ban on "nudify" apps, the tools that generate sexualized images of real, identifiable people without consent. The ruling turned on xAI's calendar.
xAI, the Elon Musk-founded company behind the Grok chatbot, filed its lawsuit on July 29, roughly 89 days after the law was signed and three days before it took effect. US District Judge Donovan Frank read that timing as the company's own evidence against urgency, writing that "[s]uch a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate."
The statute carries a $500,000 civil fine per generated nonconsensual intimate image and is the first of its kind in the country. xAI's complaint framed it as an "overbroad, content-based ban on free speech" that exposes "a wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanction." The constitutional fight is just beginning.
That fight gets its real test on August 19, when the court will weigh a preliminary injunction on the merits. Friday's order only addressed the company's request for emergency relief, not the First Amendment question.
Earlier this year, Grok gained infamy for complying with requests to transform photos of real women and children into sexualized images, prompting xAI to roll out policy changes by mid-January. On Friday, the company was the lead plaintiff asking a federal court to block the law written to ban exactly that practice.