Google has removed its AI model Gemma from AI Studio after U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn accused it of making up false stories about her.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the Tennessee senator said Gemma wrongly claimed she was accused of rape during a 1987 state senate campaign.
The AI even mentioned a state trooper who supposedly said Blackburn pressured him to get prescription drugs and that their relationship involved non-consensual acts.
Blackburn said none of it was true, not even the year. Her campaign took place in 1998, not 1987. She also said Gemma linked to fake or unrelated news articles that didn’t support the claims. According to her, no such accusation or person ever existed.
The senator also mentioned a separate case involving conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who sued Google, claiming the company’s AI models made false statements about him being a child rapist and serial abuser. During a Senate hearing, Google executive Markham Erickson admitted that AI hallucinations are a known issue and that the company is working to fix them. But Blackburn said these are not harmless errors, describing them as acts of defamation created and spread by Google’s own AI.
She also accused Google’s AI tools of showing bias against conservative figures, adding that this pattern has been seen repeatedly.
In a post on X, Google said it never meant for Gemma to be used by regular users to answer factual questions. The company explained that Gemma was designed for developers to build products, not as a chatbot for general use. Because of that, Google decided to remove Gemma from AI Studio but will keep it available through its API for developers.
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The company has not yet commented further on Blackburn’s complaint, but the issue has already sparked new debates about AI accuracy, political bias, and responsibility for false claims made by artificial intelligence systems.
