The first law in the United States banning nudification technology took effect on 1 August 2026, after a federal judge refused an emergency request from Elon Musk’s xAI to halt it.
The Minnesota statute makes it unlawful for anyone operating a website, application or program to allow users to generate images depicting an intimate part not present in the original photograph of an identifiable person. It also bans advertising such tools.
xAI sued the state on 27 July, arguing the law breaches the First Amendment, and two days later asked for a temporary restraining order to stop it taking effect. US District Judge Donovan Frank denied that request on 31 July.
His reasoning turned on timing rather than the constitutional argument. The company filed nearly three months after the law was signed and three days before it was due to take effect. Such a delay, the judge wrote, “suggests that harm is not immediate”.
The First Amendment question remains undecided. The court will now hear the application as a request for a preliminary injunction. Attorney General Keith Ellison must file his opposition by 12 August, xAI its final brief by 17 August, and a hearing is set for 19 August at the federal courthouse in St Paul.
In its filing, xAI argued the statute contains neither a safe harbour for platforms nor any requirement that an operator knew what its users were doing, and that a business whose users generated 100,000 prohibited images could face 50 billion dollars in penalties. That figure is the company’s own calculation and has not been independently assessed.
Ellison’s office issued a statement on 31 July. Governor Tim Walz responded to the original lawsuit on social media.
Minnesota’s approach is one of three regulatory routes being tested in the same month. The European Union begins enforcing transparency rules requiring deepfakes to be labelled on 2 August. San Francisco’s city attorney gave Apple and Google 28 days from 17 July to remove 13 named applications from their stores.