The United States Justice Department has told a federal court that Minnesota’s ban on nudification technology reaches further than federal law and risks “paralyzing the AI industry and hampering United States leadership in AI”.
The 14-page statement of interest, filed on 18 August and read by Unbowed, was submitted under a provision allowing the attorney general to direct any officer of the department to attend to the interests of the United States in a pending case. It is signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr, Deputy Associate Attorney General John K. Adams, and two counsel to the associate attorney general, Michael Weisbuch and Henrique Carneiro.
It intervenes in a challenge brought by Elon Musk’s xAI, which asked Judge Donovan W. Frank in St Paul the following day to suspend the law while its case proceeds. Frank took the motion under advisement after a two-hour hearing and has not ruled. Attorney General Keith Ellison attended in person, according to the court’s minute entry.
The department states its own interest
The filing opens by placing the department between the two sides. “Like the Attorney General of Minnesota, the United States has a compelling interest in combating harmful computer-generated sexual imagery and obscenity,” it says. “And like xAI, the United States has an interest in promoting the safe and productive use of Artificial Intelligence.”
It goes on to argue that federal law is “carefully calibrated” where Minnesota’s is not, and that the state statute “sweeps up constitutional and productive conduct not prohibited under federal law”.
A footnote answers an objection before it is made. The statute under which the department filed “contains no time limitation and does not require the Court’s leave”, it says, citing two district court decisions. The same footnote adds that federal law does not confine the attorney general to filing statements of interest, that he “may intervene in any case to vindicate the supremacy of federal law”, and that the United States “reserves all rights”.
MPR News reported that Assistant Attorney General Janine Kimble asked the court to strike the memo, arguing it was filed after the deadline for amicus briefs and that the federal government has no clear stake in the case. The court docket records the department’s submission as a motion to appear as amicus curiae; the document itself is styled a statement of interest and asserts that no permission is required. No ruling on it appears on the docket.
The court had already turned away one set of would-be supporters of xAI. On 12 August, Frank refused permission to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the First Amendment Lawyers Association and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, writing that “the expedited timeline of this case does not allow for additional briefs”. He had earlier admitted a brief from the Liberty Justice Center supporting xAI, and invited briefs supporting the attorney general.
What the law does
HF 1606 took effect on 1 August. It exposes companies to penalties of as much as $500,000, the department’s filing records, “for each unlawful access, download, or use” of their technology to nudify an image or video.
It is a strict liability rule. Liability turns on whether a user altered an image in a proscribed way, not on whether the company knew or intended it.
Minnesota’s own account of the law’s purpose, quoted in the federal filing from the state’s opposition brief, is that it exists to prevent child sexual abuse material and “harmful weaponizations of nudity”. The bill passed the state Senate unanimously and the House with a single dissenting vote, MPR News reported.
The argument about a definition
The department’s most specific criticism concerns a single defined term, and it is sharper than it first appears.
Minnesota took its definition of “intimate part” from a criminal sexual conduct statute written about non-consensual physical contact rather than about images. That definition covers the inner thigh and the breast, male or female, alongside the genital area, groin and buttocks. Federal law, under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, reaches “the uncovered genitals, pubic area, anus, or post-pubescent female nipple”.
The department then makes the point that gives the argument its force. Minnesota has a separate deepfake statute of its own, and that one defines intimate parts narrowly, in terms close to the federal wording. The state had a tighter definition available in its own statute book and did not use it.
Hence the example that has been widely reported: an artificially generated image of a shirtless man in a swimming pool would fall outside federal law, the department writes, and inside Minnesota’s.
Consent, knowledge and public concern
Three further gaps are identified. Federal offences require that an act be done knowingly, or else give platforms a chance to remove an image after notification before civil liability attaches. HF 1606 does neither.
Federal law applies where an adult has not consented. Minnesota’s has no equivalent provision, so that on the department’s reading it reaches a platform even where a user made an image of themselves.
Federal law also exempts matters of public concern, and material used for medical, scientific or educational purposes. Minnesota offers what the filing calls “a nebulous savings clause” for technological or artistic skill and judgment.
The department describes the federal scheme it prefers at some length: the PROTECT Act of 2003, and the TAKE IT DOWN Act signed by President Trump in May 2025, which criminalises publishing intimate images including digital forgeries and requires platforms to remove flagged material within 48 hours, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. The filing notes that xAI is itself a covered platform under that Act.
The policy argument
The last section of the filing is about artificial intelligence rather than sexual imagery. It cites executive orders stating that it is United States policy to sustain “global AI dominance” through “a minimally burdensome national policy framework” — one national standard rather than, in the orders’ words, “50 discordant state ones”.
It cites a memorandum by the attorney general of 9 January 2026 establishing an Artificial Intelligence Litigation Task Force, which it says recognises that state AI laws can interfere with American AI leadership.
The filing does concede a limit. The United States has determined not to interfere with “states’ rights to pass prudent laws that are not unduly restrictive to innovation”, it says, quoting the administration’s AI action plan of July 2025.
Its closing line is that as the country remains in the earliest days of a technological revolution and “in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it”, states “must be careful not to impose excessive measures that hinder American national and economic security”.
In court
xAI’s attorney Robert Dunn told the hearing the statute is too broad and has no exception for consent, artistic expression or parody. “There can be no question that the state’s purpose is to restrict speech,” he said, according to MPR News. Courthouse News, cited by The Next Web, reported him saying the state “would punish xAI for allowing a user to nudify themselves”. He said the company already forbids sexualised images of real people without consent and has banned thousands of users.
Kimble argued that terms of service are not working, noting that xAI is still reporting tens of thousands of users who create such images. “The repercussions only happen after the fact,” she said, according to The Next Web: someone has to see an image, report it, locate it, and the user has to be within reach of a court. Distribution is already unlawful; the state’s case is that creation has to be reached as well. She described the law to the court as a way of “stopping the issue at its source”, MPR News reported, and pointed to lawsuits brought by families who say the company’s platform was used to depict their children in child sexual abuse material.
Where it stands
Frank refused an emergency restraining order on 31 July, writing that xAI had filed “nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect”, and that “such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate”. He set an expedited schedule instead and heard the injunction on 19 August.
The law remains in force. After the hearing, Ellison’s office filed a motion to dismiss, arguing xAI has no standing to assert the First Amendment on behalf of its users. That is listed for 5 November.
An 84-page transcript of the hearing has been filed but is restricted from public release until 17 November.
Outside the courthouse
Senator Erin Maye Quade, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor member who wrote the law, said companies should not be permitted to offer such tools at all. “They are giving people the tool to do it,” she said, according to MPR News. “This is technology that does not need to exist. Our law is narrow. It is specific to the conduct we want to regulate. It implicates nothing else.” She said that if Frank rules against the state she will bring a new ban to the legislature next session.
Jessica Guistolise, who told Minnesota lawmakers she was the subject of AI-generated pornographic videos made without her consent and was left afraid to leave her house, joined them outside court. “I’m ready to continue to support this and offer my story and my experience all the way up to the Supreme Court if that needs to happen,” she said.