Minnesota became the first US state to ban AI nudification apps, after the state Senate voted 65–0 on Wednesday to authorize fines of up to $500,000 per fake AI nude. The House passed the bill the prior week, and Gov. Tim Walz is expected to sign it, with enforcement starting in August 2026. Developers of any app, website, or service designed to undress real people in images face punitive damages, civil suits from victims, and a state block on their products.
Democratic Senator Erin Maye Quade introduced the bill after one Minnesota man was found to have nudified images of more than 80 women in his social circles using a single app. The fines collected by Minnesota's attorney general will fund victim services for sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse cases. RAINN, which runs the National Sexual Assault Hotline, helped draft the law and consulted with tech companies to head off industry lobbying.
The law carves out an exemption for products like Photoshop that require genuine technical skill, narrowing the target to one-click undressing tools. "Companies that make this technology available for free online and in app stores will no longer be allowed to enable predators who abuse and victimize adults and children with the click of a button," Maye Quade said in a statement.
Key facts
- 01Minnesota Senate passed the nudify-app ban 65–0 on Wednesday, after a House vote the prior week.
- 02App and website makers face fines up to $500,000 per fake AI nude flagged by the state attorney general.
- 03The bill was prompted by a Minnesota man who used one app to nudify images of 80+ women in his social circles.
- 04Enforcement begins in August 2026 once Gov. Tim Walz signs the law.
- 05Nashville police charged a man who used Grok to generate CSAM between September 2025 and March 2026, despite xAI claiming a January fix.
The case that triggered the bill was first detailed in a CNBC report last September. A group of friends discovered that a mutual acquaintance was generating fake nudes of dozens of women they knew. The man apologized but did not identify all the victims, and because there was no evidence he distributed the images, federal tools like the Take It Down Act and state revenge-porn statutes did not apply.
“Minnesota's attorney general can now levy fines up to $500,000 per fake AI nude, with the Senate passing the bill 65–0 after a House vote of 19 the prior week.”— Jaeden Schafer
Molly Kelley, one of the women targeted, spent two years pushing the legislation. She told the 19th News she wanted "a solution to mitigate the harm when it's actually caused, which is at creation." Kelley argued that "these images don't exist without a third-party involvement and some sort of machine learning model," pinning liability on the toolmakers rather than chasing individual abusers after the fact.
The service used against the Minnesota women, DeepSwap, operates overseas with claimed bases in Hong Kong and Dublin, which is the law's most obvious enforcement gap. Kelley said she is confident the statute can survive legal challenges from any US-based firms that sue, but reaching foreign app makers from a single state will be hard. Advocates told the 19th News a federal ban would be preferable, and they fear a Donald Trump push to preempt state AI laws could render Minnesota's bill toothless.
US firms with weaker safeguards are squarely in range. Elon Musk's xAI could face fines if Minnesotans can show Grok was used to generate non-consensual intimate images of real people. X Safety claimed in January that Grok had been updated to stop undressing images, but NBC News reported last month that it found dozens of AI-generated sexual images and videos of real people posted publicly on X over the prior month.
Researchers have estimated Grok was producing thousands of harmful images per hour, and the legal exposure is widening. A week after the NBC News report, Nashville police charged a man with sexual exploitation of a minor after multiple CyberTips to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children traced an account using Grok to generate child sex abuse material. Police said the images were created from September 2025 through March 2026, well after xAI claimed it had killed the functionality. Musk has denied seeing any Grok-generated CSAM.
The Minnesota law also reaches into the distribution layer. Researchers have flagged thousands of nudifying apps advertised on Meta platforms, and Meta has already sued one Hong Kong-based app maker for violating advertiser terms, per CNBC. Any US-based nudifier openly advertising on Facebook or Instagram, or slipping into the Google or Apple app stores, becomes a target the moment the law takes effect.
Minnesota's bill is the first concrete test of whether US states can hold AI tool makers liable at the point of creation rather than chasing distribution after the fact. The $500,000-per-image figure is large enough to matter to a venture-backed app maker but small enough that the real fight will be jurisdictional, with overseas operators likely the hardest to touch. If Walz signs and the law survives the inevitable challenges, expect a wave of copycat statutes — and a serious problem for any US-hosted model that ships without working guardrails on non-consensual imagery.
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