Google pulls Gemma AI from AI Studio after false rape claim against US senator

New Delhi: Google has temporarily removed its open AI model Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the system of spreading false and defamatory claims about her. The controversy erupted when Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, said that Gemma had fabricated allegations of sexual misconduct against her in response to a user query.

The senator’s office sent a detailed letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on October 30, 2025, calling the incident "a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.” The issue has since reignited political debates in the United States over AI bias, misinformation, and accountability for generative AI systems.

In her letter, Blackburn wrote that when Gemma was asked, "Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?”, the model falsely responded that during her 1987 campaign for the Tennessee State Senate, a state trooper had accused her of non-consensual acts and obtaining prescription drugs through him. She clarified that "none of this is true, not even the campaign year which was actually 1998,” and that the model generated "fake links to fabricated news articles.”

"The links lead to error pages and unrelated news articles,” Blackburn said, adding, "There has never been such an accusation, there is no such individual, and there are no such news stories.”

Blackburn’s letter also referred to a Senate Commerce hearing earlier in the week, titled "Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech Into Silencing Americans, Part II.” During the session, Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy, Markham Erickson, said hallucinations were "a known issue in large language models” and that Google was "working hard to mitigate them.”

However, Blackburn dismissed that explanation, writing, "This is not a harmless ‘hallucination.’ It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”

Following the senator’s complaint, Google confirmed that it had removed Gemma from AI Studio. In a statement shared on X (formerly Twitter), the company said it had "seen reports of non-developers trying to use Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.” The post added, "We never intended this to be a consumer tool or model, or to be used this way.”

Gemma is part of Google’s open-weight AI initiative, designed for developers who want lightweight models that can be embedded into their own products. It is not a chatbot for public use like Bard or Gemini, but the recent misuse of the model has put Google’s safety measures under scrutiny.

Blackburn’s letter argued that Google’s AI systems have a "consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures,” and claimed that false or disparaging content about them is being disproportionately generated. The senator also pointed to Robby Starbuck, a conservative activist who earlier sued Google, alleging that Gemma generated defamatory statements about him.

She demanded that Google respond by November 6, outlining:

Her letter ended with a blunt remark aimed at Google’s leadership: "Shut it down until you can control it. The American public deserves AI systems that are accurate, fair, and transparent, not tools that smear conservatives with manufactured criminal allegations.”

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The incident adds to a growing list of controversies over generative AI tools producing inaccurate or defamatory information. AI hallucinations, where models generate false facts, remain one of the biggest technical and ethical problems in the field.