In short
Minnesota lawmakers handed a invoice banning AI instruments that generate pretend nude photographs.
Violators resist $500,000 per use and potential triple damages.
The regulation retains Part 230 protections and can takes impact August 1 if signed into regulation.
Minnesota lawmakers have handed a invoice geared toward stopping a rising type of AI abuse by focusing on the platforms that allow it.
On Thursday, the Minnesota Senate voted 65-0 to cross Home File 1606, sending it to Governor Tim Walz for his signature. The measure bars web sites and apps from providing instruments that generate sensible pretend nude photographs of identifiable individuals.
Underneath the invoice, corporations that management a web site, app, or software program service can not enable customers to entry or use instruments to create these photographs or generate them on a person’s behalf. Promoting or selling such companies can also be prohibited.
The measure permits victims to sue the individuals or corporations that function or management nudification instruments, corresponding to web sites, apps, or software program that generate pretend 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.
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The invoice additionally provides the state lawyer normal the facility to implement the regulation, with civil penalties of as much as $500,000 per use. In keeping with the invoice, these penalties are directed into the state’s normal fund after which appropriated to sufferer companies, 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 develop into extensively accessible, together with to minors. If signed, the regulation 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 collection of high-profile incidents on the social platform X, together with in August 2025, when Elon Musk’s xAI device, 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 move off future AI reproductions.
Musk can also be dealing with mounting authorized stress, 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 the 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 rapidly AI has lowered the barrier to creating nonconsensual intimate imagery and expanded its attain.
“These apps are 99% focusing on girls, over 90% of whom are below 18. It’s a device of intimidation and harassment of ladies with actually extreme psychological penalties,” Weissman advised 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 relation to enforcement. He mentioned native authorities could also be higher positioned to behave rapidly in particular person circumstances, whereas federal companies could not prioritize or pursue them in any respect.
The Minnesota regulation 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 regulation by President Donald Trump in Might 2025, criminalizes the distribution of nonconsensual intimate photographs and gives victims a path to hunt civil damages.
“I feel having complementary federal and state requirements is optimistic, significantly in idea. We’re speaking about totally different enforcement techniques and enforcement companies,” Weissman mentioned. “So that you may need a federal commonplace, however you won’t have federal capability to do enforcement actions.”
The workplace of Governor Walz didn’t instantly reply to Decrypt’s request for remark.
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