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Keith Ellison

medium confidence · updated 2026-09-26

Minnesota Attorney General since 2019; defendant in his official capacity in the two federal First Amendment challenges to Minnesota's synthetic-media statutes, and a signatory to the multistate attorneys-general letter opposing the federal KIDS Act on preemption grounds.

Contents

Keith Ellison is the Attorney General of Minnesota, sworn in as the state's 30th attorney general on January 7, 2019 (Source: ag.state.mn.us). His significance to AI policy comes almost entirely from Minnesota's two synthetic-media statutes: as the state's chief legal officer he is the named defendant, in his official capacity, in both of the federal constitutional challenges brought against them, and he is a signatory to the coordinated state-attorneys-general opposition to federal legislation that would preempt state law on AI chatbots and related questions.

Background

Before his election as attorney general, Ellison represented Minnesota's 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019. He served twelve years on the House Financial Services Committee, founded the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and the Congressional Consumer Justice Caucus, and served as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (Source: ag.state.mn.us). He served four years in the Minnesota House of Representatives before entering Congress, and spent sixteen years practising civil-rights and defence law, including five years as executive director of the Legal Rights Center, a public-interest law firm. He received his law degree from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1990, and is the first African American and the first Muslim American elected to statewide office in Minnesota (Source: ag.state.mn.us).

Defendant in the Minnesota synthetic-media challenges

Minnesota has enacted two statutes reaching AI-generated imagery, and Ellison is the defendant of record in the federal challenge to each.

X.AI LLC v. Ellison (Civil No. 26-3425 (DWF/DTS), D. Minn., filed July 27, 2026) is a First Amendment challenge by xAI to Minn. Stat. § 325E.91, the nudification statute enacted as H.F. 1606, which bars an operator of a website, application, software, program or other service from allowing a user to nudify an image or video or from nudifying one on the user's behalf. The product at issue is Grok Imagine, the image and video generation model in the Grok family. Judge Donovan W. Frank denied xAI's motion for a preliminary injunction on September 4, 2026, resting the denial on unreasonable delay and failure to show irreparable harm and on a balance of harms that "tips steeply in favor of the State," and expressly reserving the constitutional merits for the State's pending motion to dismiss (Memorandum Opinion and Order Denying Preliminary Injunction — X.AI LLC v. Ellison (D. Minn., September 4, 2026)). Ellison announced the denial publicly the same day and described the statute as "overwhelmingly bipartisan and nearly unanimously approved" (Source: reuters.com). The case is tracked at X.AI LLC v. Ellison (challenging Minnesota's nudification-technology statute).

Kohls v. Ellison (D. Minn. 2024) is the earlier challenge, brought against Minnesota's election-deepfake statute, which criminalises dissemination of a deepfake within 90 days of an election where the depicted person does not consent, the publisher knows the material is a deepfake, and publication is made with intent to injure a candidate or influence the result (State Deepfake Statutes (MN, WA, TX, CA)). The Eighth Circuit's decision in the case, reported at 166 F.4th 728 (8th Cir. 2026), was cited by Judge Frank in the X.AI order for the proposition that a court may independently deny preliminary relief for unreasonable delay even in the First Amendment context (Memorandum Opinion and Order Denying Preliminary Injunction — X.AI LLC v. Ellison (D. Minn., September 4, 2026)). The two challenges are brought by different plaintiffs against different statutes, and share only the defendant and the forum.

A related set of private actions over Grok Imagine, tracked at Grok CSAM suits (Doe plaintiffs v. X / xAI), is not brought by or against Ellison; three of those actions were identified by caption, docket number and venue in a filing by his office and reproduced in the X.AI opinion.

Opposition to federal preemption

On May 26, 2026 Ellison joined a bipartisan multistate letter to congressional leadership opposing the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (H.R. 7757). The letter objects that the bill would preempt conflicting state law across online obscenity, online harms to children, social gaming platforms and artificial intelligence chatbots, and that although it permits limited enforcement by state attorneys general it "empowers federal preemption and intervention of such enforcement in all cases." Its AI-specific objection is that the bill's Artificial Intelligence Chatbots provisions "include a gaping enforcement loophole for AI chat functions that can be construed as 'incidental' to the platform's 'primary purpose'." The signatories state that many state attorneys general instead support the Kids Online Safety Act, S. 1748, which preserves state authority, and argue that "it is too soon to shut down the 'laboratories of democracy'" (State Attorneys General letter opposing the KIDS Act, H.R. 7757 (May 2026)). Ellison's office is the host of the published copy; the National Association of Attorneys General puts the coalition at 44 (Source: naag.org).

Provenance note: the letter is a foundational source captured but not yet ingested, and is cited here by URL. Citations should upgrade to the primary text once INGEST-state-ags-letter-opposing-kids-act-2026.md is processed. The number of signatories is unsettled — see the note below.

The signatory count for this letter differs across the accounts held. Letitia James records 44 other attorneys general and 45 jurisdictions in total, from the New York Attorney General's own press release; AI and Children describes a 43-AG coalition from secondary coverage; and 39 signature blocks are legible in the copy published by the Minnesota Attorney General's office, whose final page did not extract cleanly. The discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved, and no count is asserted here.

Ellison's office has also published an Emerging Technology report (2025) at ag.state.mn.us; its contents have not been examined and no claim is made about them here.

Ellison also signed the letter of September 23, 2026 from the attorneys general of 24 states, the District of Columbia and American Samoa asking congressional leadership for comprehensive federal regulation of frontier AI. Its last request is "explicit preservation of state authority by prohibiting the preemption of state laws and granting state officials full authority to enforce these federal protections" (Letter from state attorneys general to congressional leadership urging federal frontier AI regulation (September 2026)).

Relationships

Sources

Provenance

Created by the gap-identifier on 2026-09-08, after two prior runs deferred it for want of first-party material. Built from the Minnesota Attorney General's own biography page and the multistate letter published by that office, plus the court opinion and litigation pages the vault already holds. confidence: medium: five sources, two of them primary, but the page rests on documents rather than on any account of Ellison's own AI-policy positions, of which none was located.

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