Google Earth pulls Nano Banana 2 after just two days: AI scenes spark alarm

Google Earth rolled back Nano Banana 2 today, only two days after launch. The company removed a tool that placed AI-generated photorealistic scenes over Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D map layers, after concerns grew that fake geospatial evidence could start spreading as if it were real.

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That immediately set off alarms for journalists, researchers, and open-source investigators, because it gave users a way to fabricate the kind of geospatial evidence people tend to trust. Before long, scenes were circulating that showed a refugee column at the Mexican border, a nuclear facility in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and a fatal car crash in Amsterdam.

Google said it pulled the Google Earth feature after images were shared in ways that appeared to break company policies, and said it will only bring it back once stronger guardrails are in place. The company also said the outputs were never added to the default Google Earth view and were marked with SynthID. Critics said that isn’t much comfort, since watermarking won’t stop screenshots from being passed around unchecked.

If you use Google Earth for reporting, research, or verification, the speed of this rollback says plenty on its own. Google had pitched the feature for education, urban planning, real estate visualization, and historical reconstruction, but the near-immediate reversal shows how quickly a public tool can become a disinformation risk when the safety systems aren’t ready yet.

Nano Banana 2 isn’t available in Google Earth.