Minnesota tells court Grok does not deserve First Amendment protection

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a brief on Friday opposing xAI’s attempt to block HF 1606, the state’s first-in-the-nation law restricting AI tools that generate sexual images of identifiable people, per Decrypt.

Ellison argued the company is unlikely to succeed on its constitutional claim and has failed to show that enforcement would cause irreparable harm.

With Grok Imagine, X.AI has created an unparalleled marketplace for digital sexual violence, and the state would be defenseless from the start unless it could direct its laws at the technology itself.

– Attorney General Keith Ellison

The argument from Minnesota is that Grok Imagine is a tool and not protected speech, which would take it out of the considerations presented by xAI for the judge to examine. There will be a hearing on the matter by a federal judge on Wednesday.

Minnesota’s law targets AI providers even without knowledge or intent

HF 1606 bars a company from letting users generate realistic images showing intimate parts that were absent from the original photograph of an identifiable person, and from producing such an image on a user’s behalf. Violations carry penalties of up to $500,000 per image. People depicted can sue separately.

The statute does not require that a company knew about the image or intended it. Most deepfake laws, including the federal Take It Down Act, penalize whoever makes or shares the picture.

Texas contacted operators in 2025 but only when the owner was aware of the lack of consent or did not respond to a takedown notice. Minnesota eliminated the element of knowledge, and it is the provision under attack by xAI on Wednesday.

The House passed the bill 132-1 and the Senate 65-0, following reports of a man who used social media photos to create sexual images of more than 80 women he knew. It was signed in April. xAI sued on July 27 and moved for a temporary restraining order on July 29.

On July 31, Judge Donovan Frank rejected the petition, pointing out that the company had filed almost three months after signing and three days before the effective date, indicating “harm is not immediate.” The law took effect August 1.

xAI says Minnesota’s rules could criminalize satire and consensual images

The complaint does not contest the interest of the state in preventing nonconsensual imagery, but rather, it argues that the statute reaches far past it, and the argument turns on a definition. The state of Minnesota based its definition of an intimate part on an enactment meant for crimes that involve bodily contact, according to xAI, and this covers the inner thighs and breasts, thus including swimsuits and satire.

Page 19 of the document contains an AI-generated picture that Trump had shared on Truth Social from May 1st, in which he is seen with JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum without their shirts, along with a woman who is unknown, in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a joke about the cost of repairs to the pool. Each man’s breast is depicted where it was not before, xAI argues, which makes the image unlawful in Minnesota.

“Even if subjects gave their consent, generated the images themselves or never shared them, there is no safe harbor for good-faith efforts by the provider of general-purpose AI creative tools,” the company said.

By its own math, ten such images cost $5 million and a hundred thousand would reach $50 billion.

Grok’s enforcement record highlights the scale of the abuse problem

The company has offered its compliance record as evidence of good faith. As Cryptopolitan earlier reported, xAI said in a July filing that it suspended 52,222 accounts this year and sent 73,604 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, producing at least 244 arrests in 2026.

Those figures are also a measure of scale. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in the 11-day span between December 29 and January 8, after Musk’s endorsement of the app’s editing functionality, Grok created about 3 million sexually explicit images, including about 23,000 that looked like children were depicted.

California opened an investigation on January 14 and sent a cease and desist two days later. Thirty-five attorneys general signed a joint demand on January 23. According to Ellison, a class action has been filed by five children, and two families from Arkansas have filed suit in federal court.

The European Commission launched an investigation on January 27, and the chatbot has been banned in Malaysia and Indonesia.

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