Gemini API returns 403: “Your project has been denied access” despite valid Auth key

Gemini API
1

Hello Gemini API Team,

I am requesting a manual review of my Gemini API project access.

My project “TraceRAG” consistently receives:

HTTP 403 PERMISSION_DENIED

“Your project has been denied access. Please contact support.”

Project name: TraceRAG
Billing tier: Free tier

I created a new authorization API key through Google AI Studio.

I have verified that:

  • The API key is an authorization key.
  • The key is associated with the TraceRAG project.
  • The project appears normally in Google AI Studio.
  • Listing Gemini models succeeds successfully.
  • Direct content generation requests consistently return HTTP 403.
  • The same issue occurs when testing directly with the official Google GenAI Python SDK, outside my application.
  • The AI Studio interface itself works normally.

The API usage dashboard also records the failed request as a 403 Forbidden error.

This is for a personal university software engineering project called TraceRAG, an evidence-first RAG system for document research and question answering.

I would like to remain on the Free Tier if eligible.

Could you please manually review the Gemini API access for this project/account and let me know why content generation is being denied?

I have not included my API key or any private credentials.

Thank you.