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

Google said it removed Gemma from its AI studio after a US senator accused the AI ​​model of fabricating sexual misconduct accusations against her.

In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sen. 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 the 1987 state Senate campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured him to obtain prescription drugs and that the relationship involved non-consensual 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 are supposed to support the allegations, she said, “The links lead to error pages and irrelevant news articles. There has never been such an accusation, there is no such person, and there are no such news stories.”

The letter also said that during a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Blackburn brought up conservative activist Robbie Starbuck’s lawsuit against Google, in which Starbuck claims that Google’s AI models (including Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him being a “child rapist” and “serial sex offender.”

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

On the contrary, Gemma’s slurs are “not a harmless ‘hallucination’ but rather ‘an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned artificial intelligence model’,” Blackburn’s letter said.

Tech industry supporters have complained to President Donald Trump that “AI censorship” makes popular chatbots exhibit liberal bias, and Trump even signed an executive order banning “woke AI” earlier this year. Blackburn echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there was a “consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”

However, Blackburn hasn’t always supported the Trump administration’s tech policies — she helped repeal a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “big beautiful bill.”

In a Friday night post on

“We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or for it to be used in this way,” the company said. (Google promotes Gemma as a family of open, lightweight templates that developers can integrate into their own products, while AI Studio is the company’s web-based development environment for AI-powered applications.)

As a result, Google said it will remove Gemma from AI Studio while continuing to make models available via the API.