Minnesota's nudification law took effect on August 1 [2]. U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank, sitting in St. Paul, declined the day before to block it, refusing xAI's request for a temporary restraining order [1].
The reason he gave was the calendar. xAI filed its lawsuit on July 27 and moved for emergency relief on July 29, three days before the statute took effect and roughly three months after it was signed. The order states that "such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate" [1].
That sentence is doing something narrower than it appears. A temporary restraining order is the most drastic thing a court can hand out on the shortest record, and the price of asking for one is a showing of irreparable harm that cannot wait for ordinary briefing. Courts routinely deny that showing when the movant sat on the claim, on the straightforward logic that a party who could tolerate the risk for ninety days can tolerate it for another two weeks. The doctrine has a plain name in the case law, a self-inflicted emergency, and it decides a great many TRO motions without anyone reaching the merits. Judge Frank did not hold that HF 1606 is constitutional. He held that xAI had not earned the right to have it stopped before a hearing.
The hearing is scheduled. A preliminary injunction motion will be heard August 19 at 9:30 a.m. [1]. Between now and then the law is operating.
What it operates on is worth stating precisely, because the shorthand obscures the design. HF 1606 reaches websites, apps, software and other services that let users create or access AI-generated nudified images, and it separately prohibits advertising or promoting such services [2]. The target is the operator, not the person typing the prompt. Civil penalties run up to $500,000 per violation, and a person depicted in such an image may sue for compensatory damages, up to three times actual damages for mental anguish, punitive damages, injunctive relief and attorney fees [2]. The attorney general's office and private plaintiffs both have a path in [3].
xAI's objections are not frivolous, and the strongest version of them deserves to be stated. The company's complaint argues the statute imposes strict liability on a provider whenever a user generates an image depicting an intimate part, with no requirement that the provider knew about it, approved it, or failed to deploy safeguards. There is no safe harbor for an operator acting in good faith, the complaint says, even where the depicted person consented or made the image themselves, and even where the content carries artistic, educational, scientific, political, medical, satirical or religious value [2]. xAI further argues the statutory definition of intimate part is broad enough to capture ordinary images of people in swimsuits or shirtless, which would make a $500,000 penalty available for output no one would describe as nudification [2]. A company facing that arithmetic has a rational reason to geofence rather than litigate, which is what xAI says it will do for Minnesota users [1].
Minnesota's answer is that the conduct is not close to a hard case. Attorney General Keith Ellison, who opposed the restraining order, put it this way: "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" [3]. Governor Tim Walz was blunter, responding to the suit with "See you in court, creep" [3].
The legislature was close to unanimous. HF 1606 cleared the Minnesota House 132-1 and the Senate 65-0 [1]. Those chambers seat 134 and 67 members respectively, so the tallies reflect near-total agreement with a handful of members not voting rather than any organized opposition. A bill that draws one no vote across two chambers is not a partisan artifact, which matters for how other states read this.
Two things about the case are genuinely unresolved after Thursday. The first is whether a strict-liability regime aimed at operators survives First Amendment scrutiny when the underlying images are, in a large share of cases, unprotected in their own right. The second is whether the definitional problem xAI raises is real or hypothetical, which usually turns on whether the state can show it has never been enforced that way. Neither question was reached. A denial of emergency relief on timing grounds resolves nothing about either, and the state should not read Thursday as a win on the merits any more than xAI should read it as a loss on them.
What is settled is the operating fact. As of August 1, a Minnesota resident whose likeness is run through a nudification service has a statutory claim, and the operator of that service has exposure of up to $500,000 per image [2]. That remains true unless Judge Frank changes it on August 19.
