HF 1606, the country's first state level ban on AI nudification tools that generate nude images of real people, often from their social media photos, takes effect Aug. 1.
When Molly Kelley was six months pregnant, she learned that her husband's best friend had used AI to create pornographic images and videos of her and roughly 86 other women. She spent the better part of the next year, including her maternity leave, calling about 40 of those women, hour-long conversations each, to tell them what had happened. "I did not choose this, and so I don't get to be the decider of who deserves to know and who doesn't deserve to know," the 43-year-old from Otsego told the Echo Press.
Two years later, Minnesota is building a law around cases like hers.
House File 1606 takes effect Aug. 1 and makes Minnesota the first state in the country to ban "AI nudification," software that generates nude or pornographic images of real people, often built from their social-media photos. Gov. Tim Walz signed the bill, and the chief author is Sen. Erin Maye Quade, a DFL member from the Apple Valley area who initially did not want to touch the issue, according to a Senate DFL release on the signing.
The bill's structure is what makes it unusual. Most state laws in this space, including Minnesota's 2023 deepfake statute, target the person who makes the image. HF 1606 instead creates a private right of action against two other layers: the platforms that host the nudification tools, and the advertisers who fund them. Victims can sue for damages.
That structure is a direct response to the gap Kelley's case exposed. Minnesota's 2023 law required "intentional dissemination" of a deepfake. Kelley's perpetrator shared the images only inside a private group, which she argues kept the older statute from reaching her case at all, the Echo Press reported.
She also pushed back on calling what happened to her "revenge porn," a label that traces back to the same 2023 statute's lineage. "He would have sworn that we were family," she said of her perpetrator. The term, in her telling, implies hatred that was not part of his motivation. She prefers the frame of image abuse.
The federal backdrop is the Take It Down Act, which Sen. Amy Klobuchar's office first walked Kelley through after the law stalled on its first attempt. The Take It Down Act requires platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated material, but in Kelley's view it does not undo the original image. "It's a downstream solution, and it's already been shared," she told the Echo Press. HF 1606 tries to close that gap at the state level by going after the hosting and advertising layers, not just the original creator.
HF 1606 passed the House by a wide margin, according to a Minnesota House session daily report, and is now on the books in the 2026 session of the Minnesota Legislature. CBS Minnesota covered the signing as a first-of-its-kind move to address AI-enabled child sexual abuse material, where nudification tooling overlaps with federal criminal law. The Minnesota statute also covers adult victims, including the kind of case Kelley describes.
The unresolved question is whether the civil path survives. Suing platforms that host nudification tools runs into Section 230, the federal shield that protects platforms from most user-generated content claims. Suing the advertisers raises its own First Amendment questions about commercial speech. Minnesota's statute does not preempt either doctrine, and the first cases filed under HF 1606 will likely test both. No defendants have been named yet in public reporting.
No other state has put a civil remedy aimed at the hosting and advertising layers of nudification on its books. Minnesota is now a working draft for legislators in California, New York, and elsewhere who have been circling similar language. The August effective date is the first real deadline, and the watch item is who files, against whom, and on what theory, before or after it hits.
For the roughly 86 women in Kelley's case, the law does not undo what already happened. The question for the next 30 days is whether any of them, or other victims like them, file before or after Aug. 1, and whether the first defendants named are the platforms, the advertisers, or both.