A federal judge in St. Paul has again refused to block Minnesota’s ban on artificial intelligence tools that generate nude or sexualized images of real people, leaving the first-of-its-kind law in force while the case proceeds. US District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction on Friday, according to KSTP.
The ruling is the second time the court has declined to pause the statute at xAI’s request. It does not resolve the constitutional questions in the case, which will be decided at later hearings.
What the law does
Minnesota’s legislature passed the measure in the spring, and it took effect on August 1. It bans AI technology used to create altered nude or sexualized images – the category of product commonly marketed as “nudification” apps – and imposes a penalty of $500,000 per unlawful access or download.
That penalty structure is the provision that makes the law unusual. Rather than pursuing individual users after an image circulates, it attaches liability at the point where the tool is accessed or downloaded, and prices each instance at a level that makes distribution into the state commercially unattractive. No other state had legislated in exactly that form when Minnesota did.
xAI’s argument, and the timing problem
xAI filed suit days before the August 1 effective date, arguing that the statute “imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech.” Content-based restrictions face the most demanding level of First Amendment scrutiny, and the company’s position is that the law sweeps in protected expression beyond the harm the state is targeting.
The company also told the court that it already prohibits its users from creating nude or sexualized images – an argument meant to show the law is unnecessary as applied to it, but one that sits awkwardly beside a claim of urgent harm from enforcement.
Judge Frank pointed at the timing rather than the merits. “If xAI genuinely feared irreparable harm, the Court does not doubt it would have acted more quickly” to file and seek relief, he wrote. Irreparable harm is one of the required showings for a preliminary injunction, and a plaintiff that waits until the eve of an effective date to seek emergency relief has a harder time establishing it. Nothing in the ruling decides whether the statute survives First Amendment review.
The state’s response
Attorney General Keith Ellison framed the decision as a straightforward preservation of the status quo. “Minnesota’s landmark…law banning AI technology products…from generating nudified and other sexual images continues to be in effect,” he said.
For the state, the practical value of the ruling is time. Every month the law stays in force is a month in which operators face the $500,000-per-download exposure, which shapes behavior regardless of how the constitutional question is eventually answered.
The larger fight this belongs to
The case sits at the intersection of two lines of law that have been converging for three years. One is the response to non-consensual intimate imagery, where legislatures across the country – and Congress, in narrower federal measures – have moved to criminalize distribution and to reach the tools that make it trivially easy. The other is the First Amendment status of generative AI output, an unsettled question that courts have so far addressed only around the edges.
Minnesota’s statute forces both at once. If it survives, states have a template that regulates the tool rather than chasing the images after publication. If it falls as overbroad, legislatures will be pushed toward narrower drafting – consent requirements, identifiable-person elements, distribution triggers – that is harder to enforce but easier to defend.
Courts have been active on adjacent questions this year, including institutional restrictions on AI tools aimed at protecting minors. The Minnesota case is the sharper test, because it asks whether a state can bar a category of software outright.
What happens next
The litigation continues, with the constitutional issues set for future hearings. The law remains enforceable in the meantime, and the ruling gives no indication of how the court will ultimately rule on the First Amendment claim – only that xAI has not yet shown the kind of imminent, irreparable harm that would justify suspending a state statute before it is decided.
