Elon Musk's AI company filed an emergency request to stop a Minnesota nudification ban — three months after the law was signed and three days before it took effect. A federal judge read that timeline, said no, and explained why in two pages. It did not take longer than two pages.
The Law, The Lawsuit, and the Extremely Convenient Timing
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed the nudification ban back in May. His signature was not a secret. The law was covered. People knew. xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, knew too, and did absolutely nothing about it for nearly three months.
Then, on July 29, with the law set to take effect August 1, xAI filed an emergency motion to block it. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied that request on Friday in a ruling that is polite in tone and absolutely withering in substance. According to NBC News, the judge wrote that xAI's delay in filing "suggests that harm is not immediate" — which is the judicial equivalent of writing "really?" in red pen across a homework assignment.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota's Attorney General, made the same point less diplomatically in his response filed the same day. As NBC News reports, Ellison argued that xAI's "voluntary delay should not create a manufactured emergency for the Attorney General or the Court." The hearing on whether to grant a preliminary injunction is now set for August 19. The law, meanwhile, is in effect.
What the Law Actually Does
Minnesota's law is the first of its kind in the country. It prohibits anyone who owns or controls a website, application, or software from allowing users to "nudify" images of real, identifiable people. Per NBC News, a "nudified" image is defined as one that has been "altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image," and only applies when the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe it.
Violating the law is not a slap on the wrist. NBC News reports that civil penalties can reach $500,000 per unlawful access, download, or use, on top of damages for mental anguish, punitive damages, and attorney's fees. Victims can sue directly. The state attorney general can enforce it. There are no criminal penalties, but the civil exposure is significant enough that it clearly got xAI's attention — eventually.
Gov. Walz, for his part, responded to xAI's lawsuit on Tuesday with a post on X, Musk's own platform, that read: "See you in court, creep." A governor using the word "creep" in an official legal response is not something that happens every day. It is not wrong, either.
Grok's Track Record Here Is Not Great
xAI argues in its lawsuit that it already prohibits users from generating nude or sexualized images without consent and that the Minnesota law is "overinclusive" with less restrictive alternatives available. That argument would carry more weight if Grok's actual history supported it.
According to NBC News, after xAI released a new model in December, Grok's image generation feature began producing sexualized deepfakes of real people at massive scale, triggering global outrage and regulatory investigations across multiple jurisdictions. In January, Apple threatened to pull Grok from its App Store entirely unless xAI made changes. And as recently as April, NBC News reports, users were still successfully generating sexualized images of non-consenting people by probing the restrictions xAI claimed to have put in place.
xAI also faces class action lawsuits, as NBC News notes, from plaintiffs who allege Grok created or shared nude deepfakes of them as children or as adults, and that the company failed to report the alleged perpetrators to authorities. The company telling a federal court that it already has this under control is a claim that its own timeline makes genuinely difficult to accept.
The Free Speech Argument (And Who's Actually Making It)
xAI's First Amendment case is not frivolous, which is the frustrating part. The lawsuit argues that creating images with Grok Imagine is constitutionally protected expression, and that the Minnesota law sweeps too broadly. NBC News reports xAI contends that under the law, liability attaches even when the depicted person consented, even when the image is never shared, and even when the image has artistic, satirical, scientific, or educational value.
The ACLU of Minnesota, which actually supported an earlier version of the nudification ban in February, has since turned against the final version of the law on similar grounds. The organization said in a statement Friday that it believes creating nudification technology is protected by the First Amendment, while also acknowledging that non-consensual deepfakes cause real harm to real people. The ACLU said the final bill "does not strike that balance."
So xAI has genuine legal arguments, and those arguments may eventually succeed at the injunction hearing on August 19. But the company undercut itself badly by sitting on those arguments for three months and then screaming emergency. That is not a constitutional crisis. That is a deadline management problem.
The Shirtless Trump Photo Is in the Lawsuit, Because of Course It Is
Among the examples xAI included in its lawsuit to illustrate what the Minnesota law might prohibit is a screenshot of an image shared by President Donald Trump showing himself and other lawmakers floating shirtless in the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall. NBC News reports this was included as an example of political satire that could theoretically run afoul of the law.
To be clear: xAI is arguing, in a federal lawsuit about the right to generate AI nude images, that we must protect the ability to show the President of the United States shirtless in a reflecting pool. This is the First Amendment case. This is where we are.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease and desist letters to both Apple and Google in July, demanding they remove nudification apps from their app stores, which means Minnesota is not acting alone here. Pressure on the platforms carrying this technology is building from multiple directions at once.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a company currently facing class action lawsuits for generating nude deepfakes of children simply forgot the Minnesota nudification law existed until three days before it took effect. That the emergency was real. That there was no time. xAI had three months. Three months to read a two-page law, consult its lawyers, and file a challenge through normal channels. It chose not to. Then it chose to call the resulting deadline an emergency and ask a federal judge to bail it out.
Judge Frank did not do that. He did not lecture at length. He wrote two pages, noted the obvious, and said no. The August 19 hearing could change things, and the First Amendment questions here deserve a real hearing — the ACLU's concerns are not nothing. But the constitutional merits of xAI's case and the company's behavior are two separate things, and the behavior has been a catastrophe. Grok was generating sexualized deepfakes at scale. Apple had to threaten to pull the app. Users were breaking through the "controls" months later. And the company's response to the first serious legislative attempt to stop this was to wait three months and file a last-minute emergency motion.
Gov. Walz called them creeps on their own platform. The judge told them their emergency was self-inflicted. The class action plaintiffs are still out there. Elon Musk built a product that made non-consensual nude deepfakes easy, cheap, and popular, and now the company is wrapping itself in the First Amendment and hoping nobody notices the gap between what xAI claims its policies are and what Grok actually did. Some of us noticed.
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