What do the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy and Gemma Terms of Use (April 2026) say about hosting, redistribution, modification, training on outputs and output use, and how does the Gemma 4 licence differ?

The Gemma Terms of Use (last modified 1 April 2026) treat offering Gemma or a Model Derivative as a hosted service as Distribution, count models trained on Gemma's synthetic outputs as Model Derivatives (outputs themselves are not), allow reproduction and distribution only with the use restrictions passed on as enforceable terms and other conditions, and state Google claims no rights in outputs; the incorporated Prohibited Use Policy (21 Feb 2024) bars passing generated content off as human-made to deceive. The terms page points Gemma 4 to separate terms, and the linked page is an Apache License 2.0 page. Curator qualifications: Curator addition: the Terms page itself (not only the Prohibited Use Policy) carries a 'documentation is deprecated, see gemma.ai' banner; whether gemma.ai hosts a different current text was not checked. Which models fall under the Terms versus Apache-2.0 (Gemma 4) must be checked per model card/repository; not done here. Full s.3.1 condition list (agreement copy, modification notices, Notice file waiver for Hosted Service) not re-read verbatim beyond the first condition. Terms reading only; no model downloaded or used. Not legal advice. Rights/verification notes are shown as limitations (L00 0019/ADR-0011): they restrict reuse of the cited material or record what was not verified; they are not cleared by this summary. Limitations: Live vendor pages; terms change. [component_reuse_restriction] Do not generalise Gemma terms across model versions; do not treat outputs as unrestricted. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy",
      "note": "ai.google.dev/gemma/terms (hl=en), preamble and s.1.1(b),(e),(f); s.3.1, s.3.3; ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy (hl=en); ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemma/terms",
      "note": "ai.google.dev/gemma/terms (hl=en), preamble and s.1.1(b),(e),(f); s.3.1, s.3.3; ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy (hl=en); ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2",
      "note": "ai.google.dev/gemma/terms (hl=en), preamble and s.1.1(b),(e),(f); s.3.1, s.3.3; ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy (hl=en); ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2"
    }
  ]
}