A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked Minnesota from enforcing its new ban on artificial-intelligence tools that create realistic intimate images of identifiable people, giving xAI interim relief while its constitutional challenge proceeds.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction pending appeal on Friday, Oct. 2. The order pauses enforcement rather than resolving whether the law violates the First Amendment. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office said it was disappointed and would continue defending the statute.
Minnesota’s Chapter 72, enacted as HF 1606, took effect Aug. 1. It generally bars an owner or controller of a website, application, software program or other service from allowing a user to “nudify” an image or video or doing so for a user. The law defines the term as generating or altering media to depict an intimate part absent from the original image of an identifiable person, when the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe it belongs to that person.
The statute contains an exemption for services that require substantial human technical or artistic skill to produce the result. It authorizes private lawsuits by people depicted in prohibited images, and the Minnesota House’s official summary says violations can carry civil penalties of as much as $500,000 for each unlawful access, download or use. The Legislature directed penalty money to victim-service grants.
xAI sued Ellison in July, arguing that the measure is an unconstitutional content-based restriction and is too broad because it does not expressly carve out categories such as art, satire or medical material. The company has also said its Grok Imagine product uses safeguards intended to stop users from creating sexualized images of real people. Minnesota has answered that the law targets realistic, nonconsensual sexual imagery and responds to severe harms documented during legislative hearings.
U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction on Sept. 4. His order said the company had not established irreparable harm and noted its delay in seeking emergency relief, while describing the First Amendment questions as complex. That ruling left the law enforceable until the appeals court issued Friday’s contrary interim order.
The appeal is X.AI LLC v. Ellison, No. 26-2806. The public docket shows the case was opened Sept. 9 and lists xAI’s opening brief as due Oct. 29, with Ellison’s response due afterward. The injunction means Minnesota’s platform-specific enforcement mechanism is unavailable while the appeal moves forward, unless the court modifies its order.
The dispute now turns from an emergency request to the merits: whether Minnesota’s attempt to prevent nonconsensual AI-generated intimate imagery is sufficiently precise to survive constitutional scrutiny. The appeals court’s eventual decision could affect how other states structure similar rules, but Friday’s order establishes no final nationwide standard. For Minnesota residents and technology companies, the immediate consequence is narrower: Chapter 72 remains on the books, but its enforcement is suspended during the current phase of the case.
