The Trump administration and Elon Musk have joined forces once again against a common enemy: a Minnesota state law designed to combat deepfake pornography.
Earlier this week, the Trump Justice Department filed a statement of interest effectively supporting a federal lawsuit filed by Musk’s company xAI opposing Minnesota’s so-called “nudification” ban. Multiple federal laws punish the use of artificial intelligence to create revenge porn and child sexual abuse material, but advocates say those statutes haven’t gone far enough to curb the problem.
That’s why Minnesota became the first state in the nation to pass its own ban, passed with nearly unanimous, bipartisan support in the state legislature and signed by Gov. Tim Walz (D). The law authorizes the attorney general to try to hold companies liable to the tune of up to $500,000 every time a violating image is created by a user, and Musk’s company claims that the statute violates the First Amendment.
Musk’s company xAI, the creator of Grok acquired earlier this year by SpaceX, recognizes the law as a threat to its bottom line. SpaceX already has set aside $500 million to pay out potential liabilities from pending lawsuits, summarized in a legal brief by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.
“Five children brought a class action against XAI, alleging that their photographs were used to create child porn on Grok Imagine,” Minnesota’s legal brief noted. “Two Arkansas families have sued XAI in Arkansas federal court, alleging that Grok was used to generate child porn of their daughters who are under fifteen years old.”
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX acknowledged concerns about Grok products offering “more candid, direct, or less reserved or irreverent outputs, such as ‘Spicy’ Imagine mode and ‘Unhinged’ voice mode.”
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an advocacy group that has been at odds with Musk in the past, published a study revealing the disturbing scale of the problem: “Grok Floods X with Sexualized Images of Women and Children,” estimating that the AI platform created three million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children.
Minnesota’s nudification ban aimed to combat this problem, but it should be noted some civil liberties groups — including the state’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) — expressed concerns about its reach.
Unlike its federal counterparts, the state law makes no exception for a “matter of public concern” such as political satire, and it imposes strict liability on companies without regard to their knowledge of the illicit use of their platforms. A federal judge has allowed the law to take effect, but he hasn’t issued a final ruling on the merits.
The federal government’s intervention in the case this week, however, raises questions about why it’s suddenly entering into this debate on behalf of Trump’s biggest donor.
Reflecting the government’s priorities, the Trump Justice Department sent its third top official Stanley Woodward to submit the legal brief. Woodward represented one of Trump’s co-defendants in the classified documents case, and his firm collected an estimated $1.4 million from Trump’s political action committees for representing his allies.
That raises questions about whether the government’s concern is really protecting “American national and economic security,” as its legal brief claims, or doing a favor for a powerful Trump ally.
All Rise News delved into the controversy with a video showing testimony from victims of deepfakes and the full context of the debate. Watch it here, and paid subscribers can see it ad-free below the paywall.
Also featured in this week’s rewind:
* The 9th Circuit disqualifies a Trump-installed U.S. Attorney.
* Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC gets a controversial new judge.
* Marco Rubio lashes out at the ICC.
