The Justice Department told a federal judge that Minnesota's nudification ban sweeps too broadly, without joining the case.

On August 18 the United States told a federal court that a Minnesota law goes too far — in a case the United States has not joined. The law took effect on August 1 and bans operating a nudification service: one that alters a photograph of a real, identifiable person to show a body part the original did not.

The vehicle is a statement of interest under 28 U.S.C. § 517, which lets the Attorney General send a Justice Department lawyer to address a court in a pending case without the government becoming a party. It is a lighter instrument than intervention, and the filing says so: the United States “reserves all rights,” and observes in a footnote that the Attorney General could intervene to vindicate federal supremacy. Signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., it lands in X.AI LLC v. Ellison, where Elon Musk’s xAI is arguing that HF 1606 violates the First Amendment.

Read closely, the objection is narrower than the framing suggests, and more technical. The Justice Department’s objection is that Minnesota wrote strict liability where the comparable federal statutes require that an act be done knowingly, gave platforms no notice-and-removal window of the sort the TAKE IT DOWN Act provides before liability attaches, and pulled its definition of “intimate part” out of a criminal statute written about physical contact. That last borrowing is what produces the filing’s own illustration: HF 1606 “would apply to an artificially generated image of a shirtless man in a swimming pool,” where “federal law does not.” xAI’s reply brief makes the commercial version of the point, that the same edit revealing an inner thigh or a bare chest exposes the provider to a $500,000 penalty — a figure the statute sets per unlawful access, download or use.

What makes this more than a drafting quarrel is the authority the filing cites for why breadth matters. It quotes Executive Order 14365 for the proposition that it is “the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI” — one “national standard,” rather than “50 discordant state ones” — and argues HF 1606 “stretches far more broadly with its strict liability regime to risk paralyzing the AI industry and hampering United States leadership in AI.” That is the executive order’s preemption strategy being run through a district court instead of through Congress, and the test case is a child-protection statute the legislature passed nearly unanimously. The same filing cites a second order, the one that put a 30-day federal review in front of frontier model releases, for the federal interest it says the state law disturbs. Minnesota’s opposition brief leans on exactly that, citing Moody v. NetChoice for the cost a plaintiff accepts in bringing a facial challenge. xAI is separately a defendant in a California class action alleging Grok produced child sexual abuse material from real childhood photographs.

Nothing has been decided. Judge Donovan W. Frank heard argument on the preliminary injunction on August 19 and took it under advisement; his July 31 refusal to grant an emergency restraining order rested on xAI having waited nearly three months to ask, not on the merits. Attorney General Keith Ellison moved to dismiss the same day, and that motion will not be heard until November 5. The law is in force throughout.

For anyone building image tools with US users, the operative fact is the timetable rather than the constitutional argument: a strict-liability state exposure is live now, and the federal government’s view of it carries no legal weight until a judge adopts it. The compliance work that survives either outcome is the same work platforms are already doing for Amazon’s synthetic-performer tagging rules — knowing what an edit did to an image, and being able to show it.

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