xAI sues Minnesota AG, claims deepfake law leaves Grok with 'no practical choice'

xAI is suing Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, filing a last-minute lawsuit just days before the state’s first-of-its-kind “nudification” law takes effect on August 1st. The company argues the statute is so broadly written and punitive—with penalties up to $500,000 per violation—that it has “no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features in various ways.” The timing is awkward, to say the least. The law was signed by Gov. Tim Walz back in May. Waiting three months and then scrambling days before the deadline makes you wonder if someone at xAI only recently grasped the legal exposure they were facing from a tool that, in January, flooded the internet with millions of sexually explicit deepfakes, including of minors.

The complaint itself isn’t unreasonable on the legal merits. xAI argues the Minnesota law violates the First Amendment because it’s overbroad, slapping liability on platforms even for consensual, humorous, or artistically legitimate images. The lawsuit points out, with a straight face, that liability attaches “even if the company has deployed near-perfect, state-of-the-art technical controls.” It’s a valid constitutional argument—content-based speech restrictions must be narrowly tailored. But the filing reads like a missive from another planet given the recent history. The claim that existing laws are sufficient rings hollow when Grok itself was pumping out a sexualized image of a child every 41 seconds during an 11-day period analyzed by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The real tension here is between a law that is legitimately sloppy and a plaintiff with exceptionally dirty hands. The statute carves out a bizarre exception for tech that requires user skill, leaving Photoshop-based harassment untouched while hammering automated tools. xAI’s lawyers correctly note that strict liability for user conduct that evades even “state-of-the-art” controls is a heavy burden. But this is the same company whose CEO responded to a deepfake epidemic not with a kill switch, but by touting Grok’s rise to #1 on the App Store. The lawsuit also mentions xAI has since sued a user for generating CSAM—filed, notably, over two months after Minnesota’s law passed.

This is headed for a messy constitutional showdown. xAI has a point that the law is a blunt instrument, but its credibility as a First Amendment champion is undercut by a product that spent weeks as a nonconsensual porn generator. The state will argue it has a compelling interest in stopping this specific harm. Whether Minnesota can prove its law is the least restrictive way to do that—and overcome the bad taste left by the plaintiff’s own conduct—is now a question for the courts.