Minnesota Says xAI's Grok Created 'Marketplace for Digital Sexual Violence'

In brief

• Minnesota is fighting xAI’s attempt to block the state’s first-of-its-kind law targeting AI-generated sexual images.
• xAI says the law violates the First Amendment, while Minnesota argues Grok Imagine is a technological tool, not protected speech.
• The state accused xAI of creating an “unparalleled marketplace for digital sexual violence” as a federal judge prepares to hear the case Wednesday.

Minnesota is fighting Elon Musk’s xAI over the company’s attempt to block HF-1606, a first-of-its-kind state law targeting AI tools that generate realistic sexual images of identifiable people.

In a Friday court filing, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argued that xAI is unlikely to succeed in its constitutional challenge and has failed to show that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm.

“With Grok Imagine, X.AI has created an unparalleled marketplace for digital sexual violence that poses virtually no barrier to entry,” Ellison wrote. “That marketplace, coupled with the functional capabilities of Grok Imagine, would doom Minnesota from the start if it could not direct its laws to the technology that makes digital sexual victimization possible in the first place.”

The law, enacted in April and which took effect August 1, prohibits platforms and software developers from allowing users to create realistic images showing intimate body parts that did not appear in the original image of an identifiable person.