The order
Elon Musk’s xAI persuaded the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday to suspend Minnesota’s ban on AI-generated fake nude images while the company’s constitutional challenge proceeds, Reuters reported. The St Louis-based court granted the injunction without explaining why.
The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It took effect on 1 August and prohibits website operators, software developers and others from allowing users to create realistic images depicting an intimate body part that is not shown in an original photograph of an identifiable person. The conduct it targets is known as nudification: feeding a real photo of a real person into a tool and getting back a sexualised version of it.
xAI argues the measure restricts speech protected by the First Amendment. Minnesota argues it stops a harm that is already happening.
Three refusals, then a reversal
The company had lost repeatedly below. US District Judge Donovan Frank ruled last month that xAI had not shown it would suffer irreparable harm while challenging the law, and that it had waited too long to seek emergency relief. According to a docket summary of the case, that was the third time the district court declined to stop the statute.
On appeal, xAI disputed the finding that it had delayed. It also told the court that its Grok Imagine tool includes what it called “rigorous protections” against producing nudified or sexualised images of real people — and said it has begun suing users it alleges are working around those blocks to make sexual images of people without their consent.
That is an unusual posture: a company defending its own safeguards as sufficient while asking a court to strike down a law that would make those safeguards mandatory.
What Minnesota says
The attorney general’s office said on Friday it was disappointed and would keep defending the statute as the appeal proceeds. “Minnesota’s nudification ban outlaws AI technology products from generating sexual images that harm and harass people in the vilest way possible,” said John Stiles, a spokesperson for Attorney General Keith Ellison.
The state has said it passed the law this year to address what it called a “staggering amount” of child sexual abuse material that products including Grok Imagine generate. The bill, HF 1606, was signed in May.
Why this one matters beyond Minnesota
An injunction pending appeal is not a ruling on the merits, and the 8th Circuit gave no reasoning, so there is nothing in the order to read as a holding about the First Amendment and AI image tools. What it does is leave the first state nudification statute unenforceable while the appeal runs.
That matters because a dozen other state legislatures have been drafting from the same template. A federal appeals court willing to pause the original, even provisionally, changes the calculation for every state considering one — and for every company deciding whether to comply or to litigate.
What to watch
The merits briefing in the 8th Circuit is the next stage, and it is where the court will have to say something about whether an image generator’s output is the developer’s speech, the user’s, or neither. Until then, Minnesota’s ban is on the books and not in force.
