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FIRST ON FOX: A Republican Senate accused Google and its AI of targeting conservatives with false accusations and fake news, including accusations of sexual assault that never happened.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, wrote a letter to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai The letter, first obtained by Fox News Digital, said Google AI's large language model Gemma allegedly made false and defamatory accusations against conservatives, including itself.
Specifically, she alleged that the AI made a fabricated accusation of sexual assault against her and a series of links to fake news articles to support the false claim.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, accused Google and its artificial intelligence tools of being biased against conservatives and going so far as to create false and defamatory allegations against her and others. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Her letter to Pichai comes on the heels of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing earlier this week that focused on “solicitation”—the practice of government officials using indirect coercion to get technology companiessuch as Google or social media platforms to censor messages or speech.
During the hearing, Blackburn confronted Google's vice president of government relations and public policy, Markham Erickson. AI “hallucinations” this allegedly led to false accusations against conservative activist Robbie Starbuck.
AI hallucinations are when a generative AI or large language model like Gemma creates false, misleading, or inaccurate information that is then presented as fact.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google's annual I/O Developer Conference in Mountain View, California, May 20, 2025. (Camilla Cohen/AFP via Getty Images)
Starbuck sued the company after Google's artificial intelligence tools linked him to false allegations of sexual assault, child rape and financial exploitation.
This prompted her to introduce a question to Gemma: “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?”
The AI then produced a story, she wrote, alleging that during her 1987 run for the Tennessee State Senate, she had a sexual relationship with a state trooper, and that “the trooper claimed that she pressured him into filling her prescriptions and that the relationship involved nonconsensual activities.”
However, Blackburn noted that she stood for election in 1998 and that “there has never been such an accusation, there is no such person and there is no such news.”
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Conservative influencer Robbie Starbuck before an interview in New York City on March 5, 2025. (Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“This is not a harmless 'hallucination,'” she said. “This is an act of slander, produced and distributed Google's Artificial Intelligence Model. A publicly available tool that fabricates false criminal charges against a sitting U.S. Senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.”
She said Google's AI is consistently biased against conservatives, and either intentionally or as a result of “ideologically biased training data, the effect is the same: Google's AI models shape dangerous political narratives, spreading lies about conservatives and undermining public trust.”
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Blackburn demanded that Google provide information by November 6 about how the company determines how and why Gemma created false claims about herself, what steps Google has taken to prevent political or ideological bias in AI, what protections failed to stop this incident, and what Google will do to remove defamatory material and prevent similar incidents.
“During the hearing, Mr. Erickson said:[large language models] I’ll hallucinate,” she said. “My answer remains the same: turn it off until you can control it.”
Google did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
