Ohio senator demands Google shakedown amid Gemini debacle: ‘One of the most dangerous companies in the world’

Lawmakers have started reacting to Google’s admitted racial and historical bias, and one Republican senator wants to see the “breakup” of one of the most well-known and profitable tech companies.

“This is one of the most dangerous companies in the world. It actively solicits and forces left-wing bias down the throats of the American nation,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo in a “Sunday Morning Futures” exclusive interview.

The Alphabet-owned tech giant is scrambling to right the ship after pulling the plug on Gemini’s image generation features, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling employees last Tuesday the company is working “around the clock” to fix the tool’s bias, calling the images generated by the model “completely unacceptable.”

Social media users had flagged Gemini was creating inaccurate historical images that sometimes replaced White people with images of Black, Native American and Asian people.

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Fox News Digital previously tested Gemini multiple times to see what kind of responses it would offer: when the AI was asked to show a picture of a White person, Gemini said it could not fulfill the request because it “reinforces harmful stereotypes and generalizations about people based on their race.”

Sen. Vance expanded on how the alleged bias can have ripple effects on other information sectors, including politics.

“Think about the effect this has on the presidential election when unbiased, non-committed voters are searching things about Donald Trump, and also about Joe Biden, right before they cast their ballots,” the senator said.

“We cannot allow a company that is in bed with some of the worst people in the world to control the flow of information and to bias it in a left-wing direction,” he continued. “We [have] got to break this company up and bring back some common sense standards.”

Addressing the likelihood that legislative action may be taken against Google, the senator claimed there are “growing calls” across the political spectrum for a shakedown on the tech giant, noting it’s gotten “too big, too powerful.”

“My friends on the left, Maria, say they feel like our democracy is under threat. The biggest way our democracy is under threat is you have these massive, international companies that are sort of controlling what we think, what we read, what information we consume,” Vance said.

“That’s a big problem. But I actually do think that there’s going to be growing momentum to rein Google in,” he added. “We saw this with the release of Gemini. This is a radically left-wing company that is trying to control how we consume information. If we let that happen, we are going to get exactly what we deserve.”

On Saturday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote a letter to Google parent company Alphabet, demanding that the company explain whether the Biden administration influenced Gemini’s A.I. error.

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FOX Business’ Breck Dumas and Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.