Minnesota Bans AI 'Nudify' Apps — Nation's First Law of Its Kind

The direct catalyst for Minnesota's landmark law was Molly Kelley, who discovered that a person she knew had used widely available AI 'nudification' tools to create hyper-realistic sexually explicit images and videos of her — and approximately 80 to 85 other women — using ordinary family photos posted to social media. Kelley testified before the legislature, turning personal trauma into historic policy change. Authored by Democratic State Sen. Erin Maye Quade and passed with near-unanimous bipartisan support (132-1 in the House, 65-0 in the Senate), the law takes a novel approach: rather than targeting the sharing of nonconsensual intimate images (as most states and the federal Take It Down Act do), Minnesota went upstream and targeted the tools themselves — the apps and websites that make creation effortless and require no technical skill whatsoever. Critics, including Elon Musk's AI company xAI, immediately filed suit arguing the law violates First Amendment free speech protections and lacks a safe harbor for platforms making good-faith efforts to prevent misuse. A federal court denied xAI's emergency request to block the law from taking effect on August 1, 2026. The broader debate about whether AI liability should fall on individual bad actors or the companies that build the enabling tools is far from over — but Minnesota has drawn the opening line.