Andy Walker / Android Authority
TL;DR Google has pulled its Gemma model from AI Studio after it generated a false claim about Senator Marsha Blackburn.
Blackburn issued a formal letter accusing the model of defamation; Google says Gemma wasn’t meant for factual consumer use.
Gemma remains accessible via API for developers, while the incident raises bigger questions about accountability and guardrails in public-facing AI tools.
Google’s Gemma large-language model was introduced as a next-gen AI companion inside its AI Studio platform, designed to support developers with text generation, creative drafts, summaries, and more. It represented Google’s broader push toward open experimentation with its advanced models, until everything hit a snag.
Google has now quietly pulled Gemma from the public developer interface. First reported by TechCrunch, the move follows a formal letter to CEO Sundar Pichai from Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, who said Gemma produced a fabricated allegation when prompted with: “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?”
According to the letter, Gemma responded by claiming that during a 1987 state senate campaign, a state trooper accused Blackburn of pressuring him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship included “non-consensual acts.”
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Blackburn strongly rejected the claims, writing: None of this is true, not even the campaign year, which was actually 1998. 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. This is not a harmless “hallucination.” It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model. In response, while the company didn’t directly address Blackburn’s letter, Google posted on X that it had seen reports of non-developers attempting to use Gemma in AI Studio to ask factual questions. The company clarified that Gemma was never intended for consumer-facing factual use and acknowledged the broader problem of hallucinations in large language models:
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