Request to restore Gemini API access — "Your project has been denied access" (403 PERMISSION_DENIED, suspected false positive)

Gemini API
1

Hello Google AI team,

I’m requesting a manual review of an API access denial affecting my account. All generateContent requests from both of my projects return:

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

Some models (e.g. gemini-2.0-flash) instead return 429 RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED with free-tier quota limit: 0, while models.list returns 200 with valid keys — so this looks like an account-level restriction rather than a key or quota issue.

Affected projects:

- sageio (project name: sageio)

- gen-lang-client-00070270.. (Default Gemini Project)

Timeline:

- Account created: July 5, 2026 (Google Workspace account for our startup)

- API keys created via AI Studio console on July 5 and July 10

- Denial first observed: ~July 10, 2026; still active as of July 17

Context / suspected cause:

This is a legitimate developer account for Sageio, a small startup building a meeting transcription and translation product. On July 5 we set up development API keys for our 4-person engineering team. Several keys were created in quick succession through the AI Studio console during that setup, which I suspect may have triggered automated abuse detection. There has been no ToS-violating usage — total actual API usage before the denial was minimal (a handful of verification calls).

Request:

Could you please review the flag on this account / these projects and restore Gemini API access? Happy to provide any additional verification needed.

Thank you!

2

Getting a 403 API error response and / or seeing “Unavailable” next to your project in AI audio indicates a flag has been placed on your account. To proceed:

  1. Check for banners / error callouts in the AI Studio Projects page & the Billing page. Mostly these flags cause visible banners or other errors on these pages with concrete next steps / appeal links.

  2. If you’re on the free tier with no billing attached, you should consider setting up billing. In most cases this is enough to clear any flag on your account. Please note this will mean you lose your free tier quota.