On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.
From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.
That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.
What HF 1606 does
The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.
The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.
“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.
The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.
The definition that swallowed the law
For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”
That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.
The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.
The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.
The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.
The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”
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