Google says that it has removed Gemma from its AI studio, after a senator claimed it falsely accused her of sexual misconduct. Senator Marsha Blackburn told Google CEO Sundar Pichai via an email thathen 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.”
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The letter also said that The letter also said that during a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Blackburn brought up conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit against Google, according to which, Google’s AI models (including Gemma), generating defamatory claims saying he is a “child rapist” and “serial sexual abuser.”
The letter also said 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.” It argued that Gemma’s fabrications are “not a harmless ‘hallucination,’” but rather “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”
Google’s official news account said on X, that the company had “seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.” AI Studio is a platform for developers and not a conventional way for regular consumers to access Google’s AI models. Gemma is specifically billed as a family of AI models for developers to use, with variants for medical use, coding, and evaluating text and image content.
Google added that Gemma was never meant to be used as a consumer tool, or to be used to answer factual questions. “To prevent this confusion, access to Gemma is no longer available on AI Studio. It is still available to developers through the API,” the company said.
Blackburn, who is a Republican from Tennessee, has not always backed the Trump administration’s policies on technology. For instance, she had helped to strip a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. She has also echoed many of the administration’s comments about Google’s AI systems being “biased against conservatives.”