Elon Musk’s company xAI is suing Minnesota over its ban on artificial intelligence “nudification” technology, just days before the ban is set to go into effect.

Musk’s xAI, which developed the chatbot Grok, argues that Minnesota’s law violates the First Amendment and is “an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’ ”

Minnesota’s ban — the first of its kind in the U.S. — prohibits AI nudification technology in Minnesota and allows affected parties to sue the platforms that allow nudification for damages, or to sue anyone who advertises that technology.

It’s not the first time Musk has challenged a Minnesota deepfake statute. He also filed suit against Minnesota’s law banning the dissemination of political deepfakes.

Minnesota lawmakers and advocates were preparing to celebrate the ban going into effect in a news conference Wednesday when the news of the lawsuit broke. The law will still go into effect Aug. 1, unless a judge weighs in asking the state to halt enforcement.

In a reply Tuesday to a post on the lawsuit on the social media site X, which Musk owns, Gov. Tim Walz wrote: “See you in court, creep.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said his office had not been served with the lawsuit yet or seen it.

“But I know that using AI to generate nude images of people against their will is appalling. There are plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy. This is not one of them. AI nudification robs the target of their dignity and can cause immense harm on an emotional, personal, and professional level,” Ellison said.

The author of the bill in the House, Rep. Jess Hanson, DFL-Burnsville, said in a statement this week that it’s “absolutely disgusting” that Musk is fighting the ban “designed to protect children from sexual exploitation.”

“Nudification is simply an indefensible tool of AI,” Hanson said. “As the use of AI continues to grow, so does its potential harms, with nudification features being among the most urgent to address — and that’s exactly why we banned them in Minnesota.”

At the time of the bill’s passage, Hanson said: “Governing bodies around the globe have failed to adequately regulate these evils in a timely manner. We need to ban nudification features because they allow users to create non-consensual, unauthorized, deep fakes of sexually explicit content, including child sexual abuse material.”

The ban came after years of development by lawmakers and advocates. The bill passed nearly unanimously in both the Minnesota Senate and the House.

In the lawsuit, xAI said the terms of service for using Grok prohibit using it for “any illegal, harmful, or abusive activities” that violate someone’s privacy, including altering their image to nudify them or depict them in a sexually explicit image. It said it enforces those rules against violators through account suspensions or terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse content.

XAI also said earlier this year that it has “zero tolerance for any forms of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and unwanted sexual content.”

After a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, Grok said in January it will geoblock content if it violates laws in a particular place, preventing people from editing photos of real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal. Grok’s “spicy mode” had allowed users to create explicit content, leading to a backlash from governments worldwide.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis, underwear and other revealing attire,” xAI said in a January statement.

Though Minnesota is the first state to outright ban the technology, bans are being proposed in other states such as Pennsylvania.

And, states like Texas, California, Florida and Utah have advanced platform-level takedown measures, according to multistate.ai, an online site that describes itself as “the leading resource on how state and local governments are regulating artificial intelligence (AI) and related emerging technologies.”

This story contains information from the Associated Press.