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 U.S. senator accused the AI model of fabricating accusations 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 him to obtain 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. 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, there is no such individual, and there are no such news stories.”

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

As recounted in Blackburn’s letter, Google’s Vice President for 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 on the contrary, Gemma’s fabrications are “not a harmless ‘hallucination,’” but rather “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”

President Donald Trump’s tech industry supporters have complained that “AI censorship” causes popular chatbots to show a liberal bias, and Trump even signed an executive order banning “woke AI” earlier this year.

While Blackburn hasn’t always backed the Trump administration’s tech policies — she helped to strip a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — she echoed those complaints in her letter, writing that there’s “a consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI systems.”

In a Friday night post on X, Google did not reference the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, but the company said it’s “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.”

“We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or to be used this 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 web-based development environment for AI-powered apps.)

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

TechCrunch has reached out to Google for additional comment.