After a panic-infused claim on Thursday, November 20, that Google uses people’s Gmail messages to train its Gemini AI went viral, Google is on defense and speaking to the media to correct the record.
Google has pushed back on the claim, explaining that the concern over Gmail’s “Smart Features” is misunderstood and that no Gmail users’ emails are used to train Google’s Gemini AI. The site that made the original claim has retracted its claim, too, admitting that their original interpretation was misguided.
what the hell happened
The uproar originated with a Malwarebytes story on Thursday, November 20, 2025. The response from Google was swift, but not swift enough to prevent the claim from making the rounds online. A day is a digital eternity.
Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson told The Verge on November 21, 2025, “These reports are misleading—we have not changed anyone’s settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.”
Malwarebytes has since updated its article to read, “We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features.
“The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
“Gmail does scan email content to power its own ‘Smart Features,’ such as spam filtering, categorization, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models.”
Google says that Smart Features are opt-in by default, meaning that if you take no action to enable them, they’re turned off, and nobody will be swept into the features without their knowledge and consent, although Malwarebytes maintains that “users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared.”
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