If you are a model, you already know that your face is the raw material of someone else's product. That has always been true. What is new is a piece of software that can take your face and put it on a body doing something you never did, in seconds, for free. Minnesota just became the first state to say the companies that build those tools can be sued directly for it, and the fight over whether that law survives is now underway in federal court in St. Paul.

The claim

Minnesota's House File 1606 bans anyone who owns or controls a website, app, or piece of software from letting users "nudify" real images or generate that kind of alteration on a user's behalf, with civil penalties running up to $500,000 per unlawful access, download, or use. The bill passed the Minnesota House 132 to 1 and the Senate 65 to 0, which is about as close to consensus as a legislature gets on anything involving AI. Elon Musk's xAI sued the state on July 27 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, then asked for an emergency temporary restraining order on July 29, three days before the law was set to take effect and roughly three months after Governor Tim Walz signed it. U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank denied the request. He wrote that xAI's delay in seeking emergency relief undermined its own claim that immediate harm was coming, and the law took effect on schedule August 1. The court then converted xAI's motion into a request for a preliminary injunction, with a hearing set for August 19 in St. Paul.

Why it matters

Every other deepfake case working its way through the courts right now, whether it involves a chatbot, an influencer's ad, or a model's likeness pasted into a suggestive photo, has had to answer the same threshold question: is the company that built the tool actually responsible, or only the individual who typed the prompt? Minnesota's law answers that question by statute. It puts the liability upstream, on the platform, not just on the user who misused it. That is a meaningfully different legal theory than the right-of-publicity and breach-of-contract claims that have been carrying most fashion-adjacent AI litigation so far, and if it survives constitutional review, it becomes a template other states can borrow. For independent designers who hire models, and for the models themselves, that matters because contracts and takedown notices only work after the fact. A law that lets a state go after the tool itself, before a specific victim even files suit, changes the leverage. xAI's position is that the statute sweeps too broadly, reaching parody and even a person's own stripped-down selfies, and that it amounts to an overbroad, content-based restriction on expression. Judge Frank has not ruled on that argument yet. He ruled only that the emergency posture of xAI's motion did not justify blocking the law before its effective date, which is a much narrower and more procedural finding than a verdict on the law's constitutionality.

What to watch

The real fight starts now. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's response to xAI's preliminary injunction motion was due August 12, xAI's reply is due August 17, and Judge Frank will hear argument on August 19 in St. Paul. That hearing is the first moment a court will actually weigh the First Amendment question on its merits rather than on timing. If the injunction is denied again, HF 1606 stays fully in force while the underlying case proceeds, and Minnesota's model becomes the one to watch in every other statehouse currently drafting deepfake legislation. If it is granted, expect the opinion to focus on the statute's definition of nudification, since that is the provision critics say is drawn too broadly. Either way, this is not a case about fashion on its face. But the theory at its center, that AI companies can be held directly liable for what their tools are foreseeably used to do to a real person's image, is the same theory now working its way through cases involving models and brands elsewhere. Watch what Judge Frank says about scienter and safe harbors. That language will get borrowed.

Sources