The state law took effect August 1. On September 4, xAI lost its second consecutive attempt to stop it. Judge Donovan Frank denied the company’s preliminary injunction against Minnesota’s ban on AI “nudification” — the tools that strip clothing from images of real people — leaving the statute in force while the underlying First Amendment challenge proceeds. Grok’s maker will get its day in court on the merits. Until then, in Minnesota, the ban bans.
The ruling is narrow and, for that reason, notable. Frank did not decide whether the law is constitutional; he decided xAI had not shown the irreparable harm required for emergency relief, and that the balance of harms and the public interest favored leaving a law on the books that its legislature passed. That is the mundane machinery of preliminary-injunction doctrine doing unglamorous work — and it lands against the current in Washington, where the administration is pushing to preempt state AI regulation entirely, including through challenges to state rules and pressure tied to broadband funding.
While the federal government drafts preemption, the states are already a courtroom ahead.
The Fifty Experiments Are Running
The case is a test of the newest theory in AI governance: that the fifty-state patchwork is not a flaw but the mechanism. Minnesota’s law is among the strictest — criminal penalties for distributing deceptive synthetic imagery of a person without consent, aimed at the app ecosystem that industrialized nonconsensual imagery. xAI’s argument, familiar from every platform-era challenge, is that a single state’s speech restrictions cannot govern a national network. The judge’s answer, for now, is procedural silence: show harm, win later.
The juxtaposition with the other story of the week is hard to miss. Congress is debating whether agents need inventory numbers and tamper-proof logs; the White House is drafting the argument that states should stand down; and in St. Paul, a company owned by the administration’s most volatile ally just discovered that an emergency docket is the least receptive venue in America. Whatever the First Amendment merits — and they are genuinely hard questions about machine speech and compelled provenance — the sequencing is set: the states legislate, someone sues, a district judge keeps the law in force, and the preemption fight moves up a level. The patchwork is not waiting for federal policy. It is generating the case law that federal policy will have to inherit.
The Takeaways
- Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI’s preliminary injunction against Minnesota’s AI nudification ban on September 4; the law remains in force during litigation.
- The ruling is procedural: no irreparable harm shown, and the balance of harms favors the statute — no decision yet on the First Amendment merits.
- It is xAI’s second failed emergency bid; the first, in July, failed to stop the law from taking effect August 1.
- The ban criminalizes distributing deceptive synthetic imagery of a person without consent, aimed at the “nudify” app ecosystem.
- The case runs opposite to federal preemption efforts — states legislate, courts keep the laws in force, and the case law accumulates upward.
