A libertarian law firm has joined Elon Musk's xAI in challenging Minnesota's sweeping new AI "nudification" law, arguing the statute is so broadly written it could punish users for generating images of superheroes, swimmers in Speedos, or even a satirical photo President Trump already shared on social media.
The Liberty Justice Center filed a friend-of-the-court brief Friday in federal court backing xAI's bid for a preliminary injunction against HF 1606, the Minnesota law that took effect August 1. The brief calls the statute a blunt instrument that "prohibits vast quantities of expressive speech that has nothing to do with protecting privacy," Just the News reported.
xAI sued to block the law less than two weeks ago, arguing HF 1606 violates the First Amendment by reaching far beyond the nonconsensual AI-generated pornography it was supposedly designed to stop. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank, a Clinton nominee who carries a reduced caseload under senior status, already denied xAI's emergency request for a temporary restraining order before the law kicked in. He scheduled an emergency hearing on the preliminary injunction for August 19.
The core problem, xAI and its allies argue, is the law's definition of what counts as a forbidden image. HF 1606 borrows its definition of "intimate part" from a Minnesota criminal statute on sexual contact. That definition covers the "inner thigh, buttocks, or breast", body parts visible in everyday, nonsexual contexts.
xAI's memorandum supporting its injunction motion spells out the practical consequences. The company says the ban would ensnare it for generating "benign images depicting individuals in shorts (inner thigh), men without shirts (breast), and competitive swimmers in speedos (buttocks and breast)."
The Liberty Justice Center pushed the point further. Its brief argues the law is so "irrational" that xAI faces up to $500,000 in fines if a user depicts herself as a partially clothed superhero like "Wonder Woman or the Incredible Hulk", even if the image never leaves the user's own computer.
That last detail matters. Under HF 1606, the law requires "neither intent, knowledge, nor evidence that an image or video was created or shared with the public in order to trigger strict liability for xAI," the brief states. A person who edits a photo of herself faces the same legal treatment as a stranger who edits her picture without permission. The law even punishes xAI for "an image seen by no one and deleted at once," xAI's memorandum argues.
xAI's legal filing includes what may be the most politically awkward exhibit for the law's defenders: an AI-generated image that President Trump shared on social media. The image depicts Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and an unidentified woman lounging in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, all wearing swimwear.
xAI's memorandum calls the image "political satire of a familiar kind." But under HF 1606, the company argues, it "unlawfully 'nudifies' identifiable individuals because each man's breast is 'depict[ed]' where it was not depicted before." The law contains no exception for "genuine artistic, political, satirical, journalistic, scientific, educational, medical, or religious value," xAI notes.
That omission was no accident. State Sen. Maye Quade, the Democratic, Farmer, Labor Party legislator who sponsored HF 1606, said she "intentional[ly]" left out an exemption for consensual images. Governor Tim Walz signed the bill into law roughly three months before xAI filed suit.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed an opposition to xAI's emergency restraining order that "conspicuously omit[s] the law's sweeping definition of 'intimate part' and its lack of a safe harbor for good-faith efforts to remove nonconsensual nudes," Just the News reported. Ellison instead quoted xAI's own admission that Minnesota has an interest in "curbing the non-consensual dissemination of artificially generated nude images", while ignoring xAI's argument that the law sweeps up far more than nonconsensual content.
NPR and its Minnesota affiliate covered the dispute in similar fashion, omitting the law's broad "intimate part" definition and highlighting instead its potential application to satirical images like the Trump Reflecting Pool picture.
Judge Frank, in denying the emergency restraining order, faulted xAI for waiting nearly three months after Walz signed the law and filing "only three days before the law is set to take effect." The law has been enforceable since August 1, and xAI now faces strict liability of up to $500,000 per violation while the case proceeds.
The Liberty Justice Center is best known for its Supreme Court victory against public-sector unions that collected mandatory fees from non-members. More recently, the firm backed The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website, in a successful challenge to California's ban on "materially deceptive" memes and parodies of elected officials. The firm frames its involvement in the Minnesota case as part of a broader pattern of government overreach into speech and media.
"Regardless of its motivations, Minnesota's heavy-handed attempt to restrict speech imperils the protected right of millions of Americans to use AI technology to express themselves."
The brief draws an explicit comparison to a Supreme Court case that struck down a congressional ban on "crush videos." That law's definition of "animal cruelty" was so broad it could have banned fishing videos. The Liberty Justice Center argues the Minnesota Legislature was "sloppy" in the same way, but that HF 1606 is "far more egregious" because it is not limited to conduct illegal where the image was created, and it is enforceable by private litigants with financial incentives to sue.
Federal courts have already invalidated similar AI-regulation laws in California and Hawaii. A Minnesota appeals court, meanwhile, refused to block the state's separate ban on election "deepfakes," reading an unwritten parody exception into that law to save it. Minnesota's ban on prediction markets was also blocked in court before it could take effect, part of a pattern in which state-level attempts to police digital content keep running into constitutional walls.
xAI's memorandum notes that the company "strictly prohibits its users from generating nude or sexualized images of people without their consent." The company revised its Acceptable Use Policy on June 26 to add a prohibition on "[u]ndressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person's image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context." Its prior policy, dated January 2, 2025, already barred "[d]epicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner."
But the consent prohibition language was only present in xAI's policy for about a month, and the company did not respond to Just the News queries about its legal strategy.
President Trump himself signed bipartisan federal legislation last year criminalizing users, not platforms, for creating "revenge porn," including AI-altered images. That federal law requires platforms to remove flagged content from a potential victim within 48 hours of a valid request. The contrast with Minnesota's approach is stark: the federal law targets the person who creates and distributes nonconsensual material, while HF 1606 imposes strict liability on the AI platform regardless of user intent, consent, or whether the image was ever shared.
The August 19 hearing before Judge Frank will determine whether xAI wins a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement while the case proceeds. If the court allows HF 1606 to stand, xAI faces potential fines every time a user in Minnesota generates an image showing a bare arm, a visible thigh, or a shirtless torso, the kind of content that fills every beach photo and campaign ad in America.
Legislatures that want to stop real harm, nonconsensual AI pornography, deserve credit for trying. But when a law is written so broadly that it could punish a sitting president for sharing a joke and a teenager for drawing herself as Wonder Woman, the problem is not the technology. It is the lawmakers who drafted the statute without reading their own definitions.
