Elon Musk's xAI sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison on Monday to block a state law set to take effect Saturday that bans apps enabling the creation of non-consensual sexualized deepfake imagery, with $500,000 fines per violation.
Elon Musk's xAI, now operating under the SpaceX umbrella, filed suit in federal court in Minnesota on Monday against state Attorney General Keith Ellison, seeking to block a state law that would prohibit so-called nudify apps from operating within the state.
The law, set to take effect Saturday, targets apps and websites that enable users to generate non-consensual sexualized imagery. It levies fines of $500,000 each time a user creates explicit deepfake content.
In the complaint, attorneys for xAI wrote that the statute "imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit 'nudification.'"
The legislation was passed in April and spearheaded by Minnesota state Sen. Erin Maye Quade after she learned of a man who generated sexualized images and videos of more than 80 women he knew, using their social media photos without their consent. Maye Quade told reporters that the proposed bill was comparable to older laws prohibiting the act of peeping into windows to capture explicit photographs.
xAI, now formally referred to as SpaceXAI, says it "strictly prohibits" users from generating nude or sexualized images of people without consent. The company noted in its complaint that it has filed suit against users who "evade its extensive technological blockers to generate such images in violation" of its terms.
The legal challenge comes as xAI faces pressure on a separate front. The company is named in a proposed class action lawsuit in which plaintiffs allege that its Grok AI chatbot and image generator was used to create and distribute child sexual abuse materials depicting them as minors, based on real photos or videos. That suit also alleges that xAI failed to provide information to authorities about alleged perpetrators who used Grok to produce such imagery.
The Minnesota action is not xAI's first challenge to state-level regulation of AI-generated content. The company has filed a similar suit targeting a California law designed to curb deepfake material in that state.
The Minnesota lawsuit arrives amid broader scrutiny of Musk's AI operations. In June, the Department of Justice asked a federal court in Mississippi to dismiss an NAACP lawsuit accusing xAI of violating the Clean Air Act through the use of dozens of methane gas-burning turbines to power its AI data centers without proper permits. The DOJ filing accused the NAACP of threatening "American national, economic, and energy security" by seeking to cut power to AI infrastructure supporting military operations.
The outcome of the Minnesota case will be closely watched by state legislators across the country who have advanced or are considering similar non-consensual imagery laws, as it tests how far First Amendment protections extend to the tools that produce synthetic content rather than the content itself.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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