A Minnesota law meant to outlaw AI "nudification" tools took effect on schedule after a federal judge turned away an emergency bid to stop it. On Friday, July 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank denied xAI's motion to block HF 1606, the state's ban on services that generate fake nude images of real people [1].
The judge's reasoning turned on timing, not on the merits of the law. xAI filed its challenge on July 29, nearly three months after the measure was signed and three days before it was set to take effect. Judge Frank wrote that "such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate" [1]. The denial is procedural: it clears the way for the law to operate now and leaves the substance for later.
HF 1606 defines nudification as altering or generating an image or video to depict an intimate part that was not shown in an original, unaltered image of an identifiable person. It targets the operators of nudification services rather than individual users, and it carries civil penalties of $500,000 per image [1].
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the statute would proceed on schedule: "Minnesota's landmark law banning the use of nudification technology will go into effect tomorrow as planned" [1]. xAI, the company behind the Grok Imagine tool, argued that its own rules already cover the harm, saying the tool's acceptable use policy "explicitly bans users from generating nude or sexualized images of real people without consent" [1].
The fight is not over. Judge Frank set a preliminary-injunction hearing for August 19 at the Warren E. Burger Federal Building in St. Paul, where xAI can argue that the law should be halted while the case proceeds [1]. For now the ban is enforceable, and the $500,000-per-image penalty applies to the services it targets.
