A U.S. District Judge has denied xAI’s request to block a Minnesota law banning 'nudify' apps, allowing the ban to take effect on August 1, 2026. The ruling, issued by Judge Donovan Frank, focused on the timing of xAI’s lawsuit, noting the company filed its request for a temporary restraining order on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed and just three days before it was set to take effect. 'Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate,' Frank stated. The decision does not end xAI’s legal challenge against the ban, but it allows the law to proceed while the lawsuit continues. xAI argued that the ban, the first of its kind in the U.S., is 'overinclusive' and that 'there are far less restrictive alternatives that function to achieve the same ends.'
The lawsuit follows earlier incidents where users of Elon Musk’s social media platform X used xAI’s Grok chatbot to flood the platform with non-consensual sexualized images, leading to investigations and bans. xAI, now part of SpaceX, continues to face legal and regulatory scrutiny over its AI technologies. The Minnesota law aims to prevent the misuse of AI to generate explicit content without consent, reflecting broader concerns about AI safety and ethical use.
Source: techcrunch
