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 accused the AI model of fabricating sexual misconduct allegations against her.
In a letter Speaking 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 a state trooper alleged during a 1987 Senate campaign that Blackburn “pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved nonconsensual acts.”
“None of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998,” Blackburn wrote. While there are links to news articles that supposedly support these claims, she said, “The links lead to error pages and unrelated news articles. There has never been such an accusation, no such person exists, and there are no such news stories.”
The letter also said Blackburn brought up trade in the Senate during a recent hearing conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit against Googlein which Starbuck claims that Google’s AI models (including Gemma) generated defamatory claims that he was a “child molester” 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 alleviate them.”
Blackburn’s letter argued that Gemma’s fabrications, on the other hand, are “not an innocent ‘hallucination’ but rather “an act of defamation produced and distributed by an AI model owned by Google.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump’s tech industry have complained that “AI censorship” is causing popular chatbots to exhibit a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an executive order banning “woke AI” earlier this year.
While Blackburn has not always supported the Trump administration’s technology policies — she helped remove a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — she echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there is “a consistent pattern of bias against conservative metrics demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”
In a Friday evening post on XGoogle did not refer to the details of Blackburn’s letter, but the company said it has “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and asking factual questions.”
“It was never our intention for this to be a consumer instrument or model, or for it to be used in this manner,” the company said. (Google promotes Gemma as a family of open, lightweight models that 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, while continuing to make the models available via API.
TechCrunch has contacted Google for additional comment.
