Minnesota Strikes to Ban AI Apps That Generate Pretend Nude Photos – Decrypt

Minnesota lawmakers have handed a invoice geared toward stopping a rising type of AI abuse by concentrating on the platforms that allow it.

On Thursday, the Minnesota Senate voted 65-0 to move Home File 1606, sending it to Governor Tim Walz for his signature. The measure bars web sites and apps from providing instruments that generate reasonable faux nude photographs of identifiable folks.

Below the invoice, firms that management an internet site, app, or software program service can not permit customers to entry or use instruments to create these photographs or generate them on a person’s behalf. Promoting or selling such providers can be prohibited.

The measure permits victims to sue the folks or firms that function or management nudification instruments, reminiscent of web sites, apps, or software program that generate faux nude photographs. Folks depicted in AI-generated nude photographs can search damages, together with for psychological anguish, and courts can award as much as thrice the precise damages, together with punitive damages, lawyer charges, and orders to cease the conduct.

The invoice additionally provides the state lawyer common the ability to implement the legislation, with civil penalties of as much as $500,000 per use. In response to the invoice, these penalties are directed into the state’s common fund after which appropriated to sufferer providers, together with help for survivors of sexual assault, home violence, and little one abuse.

The invoice targets instruments that require little technical experience and have grow to be extensively accessible, together with to minors. If signed, the legislation takes impact August 1 and applies to new circumstances from that date ahead.

Whereas the brand new invoice doesn’t reference a single AI developer, the information comes after a sequence of high-profile incidents on the social platform X, together with in August 2025, when Elon Musk’s xAI instrument, Grok, generated nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift. The pop famous person moved to trademark her voice and likeness with the U.S. Patent Workplace in April, maybe in a transfer to go off future AI reproductions.

Musk can be dealing with mounting authorized strain, together with a federal class motion lawsuit filed by three Tennessee minors alleging Grok generated little one sexual abuse materials from their photographs. Additionally, a shopper safety lawsuit from town of Baltimore claims the corporate knowingly deployed a system that produces and spreads nonconsensual sexualized content material, together with of minors.

Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman mentioned the unfold of those instruments displays how shortly AI has lowered the barrier to creating nonconsensual intimate imagery and expanded its attain.

“These apps are 99% concentrating on ladies, over 90% of whom are underneath 18. It’s a instrument of intimidation and harassment of girls with actually extreme psychological penalties,” Weissman instructed Decrypt. “You’ve seen this throughout the nation and the world. So the necessity for presidency intervention and regulation is acute.”

Weissman added that state-level legal guidelines can play a job alongside federal efforts, particularly in the case of enforcement. He mentioned native authorities could also be higher positioned to behave shortly in particular person circumstances, whereas federal businesses could not prioritize or pursue them in any respect.

The Minnesota legislation additionally comes throughout an ongoing combat between President Donald Trump’s administration and states over who ought to management AI regulation. The Take It Down Act, signed into legislation by President Donald Trump in Could 2025, criminalizes the distribution of nonconsensual intimate photographs and gives victims a path to hunt civil damages.

“I believe having complementary federal and state requirements is constructive, notably in principle. We’re speaking about completely different enforcement methods and enforcement businesses,” Weissman mentioned. “So that you may need a federal commonplace, however you may not have federal capability to do enforcement actions.”

The workplace of Governor Walz didn’t instantly reply to Decrypt’s request for remark.