Request for review: 403 PERMISSION_DENIED "project has been denied access" persists across 3 keys / 2 projects, 2FA enabled, billing shows Unavailable

I’m getting 403 PERMISSION_DENIED — "Your project has been denied access. Please contact support." on every generateContent call to the Gemini API, and I’ve ruled out the usual causes:

  • Persists across multiple projects and keys. Tried on the original project (apextrack-507616) and a brand-new project created directly through AI Studio’s “Create project” flow, with three separate API keys generated across them. Identical error every time.
  • Not a billing issue in the normal sense. The Billing Tier for these projects shows “Set up billing — Unavailable,” and clicking “Set up billing” just spins indefinitely rather than loading Cloud Billing’s account-linking flow.
  • 2-Step Verification is enabled on the Google account, done specifically to try to clear this, per other threads here about account-level restrictions. No change after enabling it.
  • New project/key creation attempts are now themselves being blocked with “Failed to create project, The request is suspicious. Please try again.” / “Failed to generate API key, The request is suspicious.”

This is a brand-new Google Cloud account (created today) being used to add a Gemini-powered chatbot to an ed-tech app for college recruiting students. Could someone from the team take a manual look at the account tied to this project ID and lift the restriction, or tell me what specifically triggered it?

Project ID: apextrack-50761..