Google says it has removed Gemma from its AI Studio after a US senator accused the AI model of fabricating allegations of sexual misconduct against her.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sen. Marsha Blackburn — Republican from Tennessee — said that when Gemma was asked, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” he responded by falsely claiming that during a 1987 state Senate campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “forced him to take prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”
“None of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998,” Blackburn wrote. Although there are links to news articles purporting to support these claims, he said, “The links lead to error pages and unrelated news articles. There has never been such an accusation, there is no such person and there is no such news.”
The letter also said that during a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Blackburn said Conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit against Googlein which Starbuck claims Google’s AI models (including Gemma) made defamatory claims about him being a “child rapist” and “serial sex offender”.
According to Blackburn’s letter, Google Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy Markham Erickson responded that hallucinations are a known issue and Google is “working hard to mitigate them.”
Blackburn’s letter argued that instead, Gemma’s constructions “are not a harmless ‘hallucination’ but rather ‘an act of defamation produced and distributed by an artificial intelligence model owned by Google.’
Supporters of President Donald Trump’s tech industry have complained that “artificial intelligence censorship” makes popular chatbots show a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an executive order banning “awakened artificial intelligence” earlier this year.
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While Blackburn hasn’t always supported the Trump administration’s tech policies — she helped lift a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — she echoed those complaints in her letter, writing that there is “a consistent pattern of bias against conservatives demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”
In a Friday night post on XGoogle did not comment on the details 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 real questions.”
“We never intended it to be a consumer tool or model or to be used that way,” 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 online development environment for AI-powered applications.)
As a result, Google said it is removing Gemma from AI Studio, while continuing to make the models available via API.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment.
