Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote in a letter on Wednesday to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that removing Gemma from its AI studio does not prevent the distribution of the AI model from generating “patently false and defamatory statements” about her and other conservatives.
Blackburn wrote her letter to the Google chief executive after she accused Google of defaming her with “patently false material” generated by the big tech platform’s Gemma AI from its AI studio platform.
She wrote to Google in response to a letter she had received from the big tech company, explaining why the company’s Gemma AI model made “defamatory” statements about her, accusing her of sexual assault. Blackburn did not find Google’s explanation convincing.
11.19.2025 Response to Google Re Gemma by Breitbart News
In her letter to Pichai, which was obtained by Breitbart News, Blackburn described it as a “catastrophic failure of oversight of an AI model downloaded by more than 200 million people. It is also emblematic of a broader pattern of bias against conservatives within Google’s products.”
Blackburn raised issues about merely removing Gemma from its AI studio platform, saying:
Google acknowledges that Gemma remains fully accessible to developers, who have already exported and deployed the same underlying model weights across hundreds of downstream applications and interactive tools. Removing Gemma from AI Studio does nothing to prevent those developers from continuing to deploy and distribute variations of the same model that generated patently false and defamatory statements about me and other conservatives. In other words, the model that produced the defamatory content has not been contained. It continues to be re-packaged and re-distributed across platforms you do not control but which your company enables. [Emphasis added]
Google has known about Gemma’s harmful hallucinations for years but chose to turn a blind eye until it needed to save face. Google has demonstrated that it is technically capable of preventing these defamatory outputs. When the same query of whether I have been accused of rape is entered into your flagship Gemini model, the model does not fabricate criminal allegations. This proves that the harm is neither inevitable nor inherent to the technology. It is the outcome of design and deployment choices made by Google. [Emphasis added]
During a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Blackburn noted that the Gemma AI generated reportedly defamatory statements about conservative activist Robby Starbuck being a “child rapist” and a “serial sexual abuser.” A Google government affairs executive said that this sort of hallucination is a known issue, and they are working to address it.
Blackburn said, “My message is simple: Shut your AI models down completely until you can control them. The American public deserves AI systems that are accurate, fair and transparent — not tools that smear conservatives with manufactured criminal allegations.”
“Google’s response is a desperate attempt to dodge accountability and blames the fabrication of heinous criminal allegations on ‘technical issues.’ Google’s unacceptable excuses fail to address how this happened and how the company will prevent it from happening in the future,” Blackburn concluded in her letter to Google.
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