Google has removed its Gemma family of open models from AI Studio, the company’s web-based environment for building on its models. The move follows a letter sent Thursday to CEO Sundar Pichai by Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, who said Gemma fabricated a sexual-misconduct allegation against her, complete with links to news articles that do not exist.

Asked whether Blackburn had been accused of rape, the model answered that she had been accused of a relationship with a state trooper during a campaign in which she alleged he was pressured to obtain prescription drugs for her, according to her letter. Blackburn wrote that none of it is true, including the year, and that the cited links resolve to error pages and unrelated stories. She called the output defamation rather than a hallucination, and pointed to conservative activist Robby Starbuck’s lawsuit claiming Google models labeled him a child rapist as evidence of a pattern. According to Blackburn’s letter, Google’s government affairs chief, Markham Erickson, told a Senate hearing that hallucinations are a known issue being mitigated; Blackburn rejects that framing.

In a Friday-night post on X, Google did not address the specifics. It said it had seen reports of non-developers asking Gemma factual questions in AI Studio, that the model was never intended as a consumer tool or for factual assistance, and that access would be pulled there while remaining available to developers through the API.

The fight that night was over what was actually removed. For developers, the API key still works. For everyone else, the open models just got harder to reach, which is a strange outcome for a family Google markets as open.