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Robby Starbuck has taken the fight to Big Tech’s doorstep, filing a defamation lawsuit against Google this month after he says the company’s AI chatbots produced grotesque, fabricated accusations about him. According to the complaint, Google’s systems falsely branded Starbuck with crimes so extreme they would ruin any public figure’s reputation if believed, and he has asked a Delaware court to hold the company accountable.
The AI-generated falsehoods Starbuck describes are shocking: the suit alleges the bots accused him of sexual assault and child rape, linked him to murder investigations, and even manufactured phony news articles and source links to make the lies look real. These weren’t minor errors or innocuous misstatements; they were career- and life-destroying fabrications that, Starbuck says, were presented as factual by Google’s own products.
Starbuck’s complaint says Google knew of the problem and failed to fix it, and he’s seeking more than $15 million in damages while asking the court for an injunction to stop the tech giant from spreading defamatory output. The suit paints a portrait of negligence — or worse — claiming the false narratives persisted even after Starbuck alerted Google and demanded correction.
Google’s defense so far is the familiar hand-wringing from Silicon Valley: its AI can “hallucinate,” and bad prompts can produce misleading answers. That argument is no longer good enough when these so-called hallucinations invent crimes and attribute them to political actors, and when they appear to target conservatives pushing back on corporate woke agendas. The time for euphemisms is over; if AI can fabricate criminality out of thin air, real people will pay the price.
This lawsuit follows a strikingly similar fight Starbuck waged against Meta earlier in 2025, when he sued after the company’s AI repeatedly accused him of participating in the January 6 riot — allegations he says were false and dangerous. Meta eventually settled with Starbuck and agreed to work on accuracy issues, but that patchwork response proves the problem is systemic across the tech oligopoly, not limited to one platform.
Starbuck isn’t some fringe gadfly; he’s a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow working on capital markets and corporate accountability, so his warnings about weaponized AI and election interference can’t be dismissed as partisan whining. He has repeatedly sounded the alarm that left-wing tech platforms and their AI products can flip narratives, destroy reputations, and — in a close race — tilt outcomes by poisoning information voters rely on. Heritage’s own announcement of his fellowship underscores that this is now a policy fight as much as a personal one.
Hardworking Americans should take this lawsuit as a wake-up call: Big Tech must face consequences for systems that manufacture lies about citizens and public figures, and Congress should demand real transparency, accountability, and a path to legal remedy. If we allow a handful of Silicon Valley giants to decide who is credible and who is dead on arrival, then our elections, our jobs, and our liberties are at risk — and patriots must not stand idly by while the left’s digital smear machine runs amok.
