Elon Musk's AI Company Sues Minnesota Attorney General Ellison Over Nudification Ban

By Michelle Griffith, Minnesota Reformer

July 28, 2026

An artificial intelligence development company created by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison Monday over Minnesota’s new law that bans the use of what’s known as nudification technology.

xAI, which developed the Grok chatbot, argues in the lawsuit that the law — which goes into effect Saturday — is too broad and infringes on free speech. Minnesota’s evenly divided Legislature was the first in the country to enact the ban on accessing or using technology that creates sexually explicit images or videos of a person without their consent. The bill passed the House 132-1 and the Senate passed it 65-0.

Nudication technology is an increasing trend in school cyberbullying, and many young girls have been targeted by deepfake, sexually explicit images depicting their likeness.

The law punishes AI platforms for letting users depict a person’s “intimate part” using nudification technology. It also imposes a $500,000 fine on the AI company each time a person uses the technology to generate or alter an image to make it sexually explicit.

xAI said in its lawsuit that it doesn’t take issue with Minnesota outlawing the “dissemination of artificially generated nude images of real people without their consent. But the statute Minnesota enacted extends far beyond that goal.”

Ellison in a statement said his office is waiting to be served and will respond to it in court, but he said using AI to generate nude images of people against their will is “appalling.”

“There are plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy. This is not one of them,” Ellison said in a statement. “AI nudification robs the target of their dignity and can cause immense harm on an emotional, personal and professional level.”

In the complaint, which cites Musk’s own X posts, xAI said its product — Grok Imagine — allows users to create images or alter them. Users need to agree to the platform’s terms of service, which already bans people from using the AI chatbot to create child sexual abuse material or depict a person’s likeness in a pornographic manner.

The company said it has suspended over 50,000 accounts and made over 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has resulted in 244 arrests.

xAI argues the law doesn’t adequately define “intimate parts.” xAI also says that the law’s definition of nudification would prohibit the lawful generation of images and included a few examples in its complaint; e.g., an AI-generated image posted by President Donald Trump depicting the president, vice president, a few cabinet members and an unknown woman clad in bathing suits in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The image of the bare-chested men could fall under Minnesota’s nudification ban, which would violate the First Amendment.

“An ‘intimate part’ (the breast) of at least the President, Vice President, Secretary of the Interior, and the woman are ‘depict[ed],’ with the Secretary of State also at least arguably included as well,” the lawsuit states. “The examples are endless. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can make humorous, scientific, artistic, satirical, or innocuous images that Minnesota’s (law) bans as ‘nudification.’”

xAI is asking the federal court to declare the law unconstitutional and issue an injunction to enjoin Ellison from enforcing the ban.

One of the bill’s chief author’s, Rep. Jessica Hanson, DFL-Burnsville, said that nudification victims are overwhelmingly women and children and said that Musk and corporations were profiting off of their exploitation.

“It’s absolutely disgusting that Elon Musk and his xAI are fighting a law designed to protect children from sexual exploitation. Nudification is simply an indefensible tool of AI. As the use of AI continues to grow, so does its potential harms, with nudification features being among the most urgent to address – and that’s exactly why we banned them in Minnesota.”

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..