A US federal judge denied xAI’s bid to block Minnesota’s new law banning AI ‘nudification’ tools, allowing the statute to take effect on August 1, 2026; the law imposes civil penalties of up to $500,000 per unlawful use and lets victims sue for compensatory and punitive damages. The ruling came as xAI’s Grok chatbot faced at least five additional lawsuits by early August 2026 over its image-generation feature producing nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real people, including minors, adding to prior suits from a US city, a proposed class of children, and a UK lawmaker. xAI has said it suspended more than 50,000 accounts and made over 70,000 reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2026 for misuse of the feature.