Minnesota's ban on "nudify" apps took effect on August 1 after a federal judge refused to pause it. US District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI's emergency request the day before, and the reason he gave had nothing to do with free speech — it was about timing. Elon Musk's AI company waited nearly three months after the law was signed before asking a court to stop it, filing three days before it took effect.
The ruling
"Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," Frank wrote, as reported by Engadget. xAI filed its motion for a temporary restraining order on July 29. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had urged the court to reject what he called a "manufactured emergency."
This is a procedural loss, not a verdict. The judge did not rule on whether the law is constitutional. A hearing on a preliminary injunction — where xAI gets to argue the merits and try again to suspend the law while the case runs — is set for August 19.
What the law does
The statute bans apps and websites that produce realistic altered or AI-generated intimate images of identifiable real people without their consent. The enforcement mechanism is money, not jail: NBC News reports civil penalties of up to $500,000 (around ₱30.6 million) for each unlawful access, download or use, plus possible awards for mental anguish, punitive damages and attorney's fees.
There are no criminal penalties. Both the state and individual victims can sue — meaning a private person whose likeness was used can bring their own case.
xAI's argument, and who else objects
xAI calls the law an "overbroad, content-based ban on free speech." Its more specific complaint is about strict liability: the company says the law makes platform operators liable regardless of whether their terms of service prohibit nudification or whether they deploy technical controls to block it.
xAI says it does both. Its Grok Imagine acceptable use policy explicitly bans generating nude or sexualised images of real people without consent, and the company reports suspending more than 50,000 accounts and filing more than 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2026 alone.
It is not alone in objecting on legal grounds. The ACLU of Minnesota, which supported earlier versions, opposes the final bill, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argues the law is unconstitutionally broad. That matters for how this reads: the free-speech concern is not purely a company talking point.
Separately, xAI and SpaceX face class action lawsuits alleging Grok generated nude deepfakes of both adults and minors.
The Philippines has already been through this with Grok
Filipino readers do not need a hypothetical here. In January 2026, the Department of Information and Communications Technology ordered Grok blocked in the Philippines over exactly this problem.
DICT Secretary Henry Aguda and Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center chief Undersecretary Aboy Paraiso asked the National Telecommunications Commission to block access within 24 hours, citing Republic Act 10175, the Cybercrime Prevention Act. The stated ground was Grok's ability to produce sexually explicit material and nonconsensual deepfakes of real people, including women and minors.
"We moved fast as ordered by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.," Aguda said at the time. "The President told us that if there is harm to the public, we need to act fast." Paraiso's concern was access: "Because it's available to everyone, even our minors can access it."
The Philippines was not first in the region. Indonesia blocked Grok before it did, and Malaysia followed, with Malaysia's regulator citing repeated misuse to generate obscene, nonconsensual imagery.
Two different tools, one problem
The contrast is the useful part. The Philippines reached for a blocking order under an existing cybercrime law — fast, blunt, and reversible; DICT later studied lifting the ban after xAI committed to safeguards. Minnesota wrote a new statute with per-use civil penalties that victims themselves can enforce, which is slower to pass but does not require a regulator to keep watching.
A blocking order stops access at the network edge and does nothing for a Filipino whose likeness has already been used. A private right of action gives that person a remedy but only works if there is a law creating one. The Philippines currently has neither a dedicated deepfake statute nor a per-image penalty of Minnesota's kind — bills addressing nonconsensual deepfakes have been filed in Congress, but none has become law.
For Filipino users, that gap is the practical point. Grok is available here again in various forms, including bundled through Globe's AI Fiesta subscription and as a free Microsoft Word add-in. The safeguards that apply to a Filipino user are whatever xAI chooses to enforce, plus whatever DICT is willing to block — not a right you can take to court.
What to watch
August 19 is the date. If Frank grants a preliminary injunction, the law is suspended while the case proceeds and other US states drafting similar bills will slow down. If he does not, Minnesota's approach becomes the model others copy — and the question of whether a platform can be held liable for what its users generate gets its first real test.
