AIBRIEF
xAI, the Musk owned lab behind Grok, lost its bid to block Minnesota's nudification ban, which took effect Saturday with $500,000 per image penalties.
Minnesota's anti-nudification law took effect Saturday after U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI's last-minute request for a temporary restraining order. The statute targets apps that remove clothing or expose intimate parts of a recognizable real person at the push of a button, and it carries stacked penalties of up to $500,000 per generation and per access, plus a private right of action for the people depicted.
xAI, Elon Musk's AI lab and the company behind the Grok chatbot, sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison in late April on First Amendment grounds. Its complaint flagged AI-generated images of Trump administration officials in bathing suits and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in a sumo mawashi wrestling Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker as examples of speech the law could chill. But xAI waited until July 29, nearly three months after the statute was signed and three days before it took effect, to file for a TRO. "Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," Frank wrote in his order.
The court did not reach the First Amendment question. The underlying suit proceeds, and other states are watching the first U.S. nudification-app statute to go live as a possible template. Grok became a viral meme over the recent holiday season for non-consensually generating sexualized images of real people.