Minnesota Moves to Ban AI Apps That Generate Fake Nude Images

Minnesota lawmakers person passed a measure aimed astatine stopping a increasing signifier of AI maltreatment by targeting the platforms that alteration it.

On Thursday, the Minnesota Senate voted 65-0 to walk House File 1606, sending it to Governor Tim Walz for his signature. The measurement bars websites and apps from offering tools that make realistic fake nude images of identifiable people.

Under the bill, companies that power a website, app, oregon bundle work cannot let users to entree oregon usage tools to make these images oregon make them connected a user’s behalf. Advertising oregon promoting specified services is besides prohibited.

The measurement allows victims to writer the radical oregon companies that run oregon power nudification tools, specified arsenic websites, apps, oregon bundle that make fake nude images. People depicted successful AI-generated nude images tin question damages, including for intelligence anguish, and courts tin grant up to 3 times the existent damages, on with punitive damages, lawyer fees, and orders to halt the conduct.

The measure besides gives the authorities lawyer wide the powerfulness to enforce the law, with civilian penalties of up to $500,000 per use. According to the bill, those penalties are directed into the state’s wide money and past appropriated to unfortunate services, including enactment for survivors of intersexual assault, home violence, and kid abuse.

The measure targets tools that necessitate small method expertise and person go wide accessible, including to minors. If signed, the instrumentality takes effect August 1 and applies to caller cases from that day forward.

While the caller measure doesn’t notation a azygous AI developer, the quality comes aft a bid of high-profile incidents connected the societal level X, including successful August 2025, erstwhile Elon Musk’s xAI tool, Grok, generated nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift. The popular superstar moved to trademark her dependable and likeness with the U.S. Patent Office successful April, possibly successful a determination to caput disconnected aboriginal AI reproductions.

Musk is besides facing mounting ineligible pressure, including a national class action suit filed by 3 Tennessee minors alleging Grok generated kid intersexual maltreatment worldly from their images. Also, a user extortion lawsuit from the metropolis of Baltimore claims the institution knowingly deployed a strategy that produces and spreads nonconsensual sexualized content, including of minors.

Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said the dispersed of these tools reflects however rapidly AI has lowered the obstruction to creating nonconsensual intimate imagery and expanded its reach.

“These apps are 99% targeting women, implicit 90% of whom are nether 18. It’s a instrumentality of intimidation and harassment of women with truly terrible intelligence consequences,” Weissman told Decrypt. “You’ve seen this crossed the state and the world. So the request for authorities involution and regularisation is acute.”

Weissman added that state-level laws tin play a relation alongside national efforts, particularly erstwhile it comes to enforcement. He said section authorities whitethorn beryllium amended positioned to enactment rapidly successful idiosyncratic cases, portion national agencies whitethorn not prioritize oregon prosecute them astatine all.

The Minnesota instrumentality besides comes during an ongoing combat betwixt President Donald Trump’s medication and states implicit who should power AI regulation. The Take It Down Act, signed into instrumentality by President Donald Trump successful May 2025, criminalizes the organisation of nonconsensual intimate images and provides victims a way to question civilian damages.

“I deliberation having complementary national and authorities standards is positive, peculiarly successful theory. We’re talking astir antithetic enforcement systems and enforcement agencies,” Weissman said. “So you mightiness person a national standard, but you mightiness not person national capableness to bash enforcement actions.”

The bureau of Governor Walz did not instantly respond to Decrypt’s petition for comment.