Google pulls Gemma from AI Studio after Senator Blackburn accuses model of defamation

Google says it has removed Gemma from its AI studio after a US senator falsely accused the AI ​​model of sexual misconduct against her.

In a letter To Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn – a Republican from Tennessee – said that when Gemma was asked, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” It responded by falsely claiming that during a 1987 state Senate campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured her into obtaining prescription drugs for him and that the relationship involved nonconsensual acts.”

“None of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998,” wrote Blackburn. Although there are links to news articles that support these claims, he said, “The links lead to error pages and unrelated news articles. There has never been such an allegation, no such person and no such news.”

The letter also states that during a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Blackburn singled out Conservative activist Robbie Starbuck’s lawsuit against GoogleSo that Starbuck claims that Google’s AI models (including Gemma) made defamatory claims calling him a “child rapist” and “serial sexual abuser”.

As noted in Blackburn’s letter, Markham Erickson, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, responded that hallucinations are a known problem and that Google is “working hard to mitigate them.”

Blackburn’s letter argued, to the contrary, that Jemma’s fabrication was “not a harmless ‘hallucination'” but rather “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-proprietary AI model.”

Supporters of President Donald Trump’s tech industry Alleges that “AI Censorship” Causes popular chatbots to show a liberal bias, and so does Trump Signed an executive order banning “weak AI.” Earlier this year.

While Blackburn didn’t always support the Trump administration’s technology policies — he helped Lift a moratorium on state-level AI regulation From Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — he echoed those accusations in his letter, writing that “there is a consistent pattern of bias against conservative people displayed by Google’s AI system.”

In Friday night post on XGoogle did not specify the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, but the company said it had “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and asking it practical questions.”

“We never intended it to be a consumer device or model or to be used as such,” the company said. (Google promotes Gemma as A family of open, light models (which developers can integrate into their own products, while AI Studio is the company’s web-based development environment for AI-powered apps.)

As a result, Google said it is removing Gemma from AI Studio and will continue to make the models available through the API.

TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment.