Google says it has eliminated Gemma from its AI Studio after a U.S. senator accused the AI mannequin of fabricating accusations of sexual misconduct towards her.

In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Senator Marsha Blackburn — a Republican from Tennessee — stated that when Gemma was requested, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” it responded by falsely claiming that in a 1987 state senate marketing campaign, a state trooper alleged that Blackburn “pressured him to acquire prescribed drugs for her and that the connection concerned non-consensual acts.”

“None of that is true, not even the marketing campaign yr which was truly 1998,” Blackburn wrote. Whereas there are hyperlinks to information articles that supposedly help these claims, she stated, “The hyperlinks result in error pages and unrelated information articles. There has by no means been such an accusation, there isn’t a such particular person, and there are not any such information tales.”

The letter additionally stated that in a latest Senate Commerce listening to, Blackburn introduced up conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit against Google, wherein Starbuck claims Google’s AI fashions (together with Gemma) generated defamatory claims about him being a “youngster rapist” and “serial sexual abuser.”

As recounted in Blackburn’s letter, Google’s Vice President for Authorities Affairs and Public Coverage Markham Erickson responded that hallucinations are a identified situation and Google is “working exhausting to mitigate them.”

Blackburn’s letter argued that quite the opposite, Gemma’s fabrications are “not a innocent ‘hallucination,’” however slightly “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI mannequin.”

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

Whereas Blackburn hasn’t at all times backed the Trump administration’s tech insurance policies — she helped to strip a moratorium on state-level AI regulation from Trump’s “Massive Lovely Invoice” — she echoed these complaints in her letter, writing that there’s “a constant sample of bias towards conservative figures demonstrated by Google’s AI techniques.”

In a Friday night post on X, Google didn’t reference the specifics of Blackburn’s letter, however the firm stated it’s “seen experiences of non-developers attempting to make use of Gemma in AI Studio and ask it factual questions.”

“We by no means meant this to be a shopper instrument or mannequin, or for use this fashion,” the corporate stated. (Google promotes Gemma as a family of open, lightweight models that builders can combine into their very own merchandise, whereas AI Studio is the corporate’s web-based growth atmosphere for AI-powered apps.)

In consequence, Google stated it’s eradicating Gemma from AI Studio whereas persevering with to make the fashions out there by way of API.

TechCrunch has reached out to Google for extra remark.