DuckDuckGo AI Chat Promises Anonymous Access to Popular AI Chatbots

DuckDuckGo, the company known for its search engine that doesn’t track its users is launching today DuckDuckGo AI chat, a hub for accessing popular AI chatbots in a more private way. DuckDuckGo AI Chat promises anonymous chats with Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta Llama 3, and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B, with no chats being used for AI training.

DuckDuckGo previously launched its own generative AI chatbot called DuckAssist, which puts AI-generated answers at the top of search results, similar to Google’s AI Overviews. However, while DuckAssist limited its answers to content from Wikipedia, Britannica, and other established sources, DuckDuckGo AI Chat aims to provide private access to the most popular AI chatbots (except for Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot) all in one place.

“We believe people should be able to use the Internet and other digital tools without feeling like they need to sacrifice their privacy in the process,” the company explained today. “So, we meet people where they are, developing products that add a layer of privacy to the everyday things they do online. That’s been our approach across the board – first with search, then browsing, email, and now with generative AI via AI Chat.”

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is free to use and accessible from duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat, though there are daily usage limits. To make chats anonymous, the AI chatbot hub calls the underlying chat models directly and uses DuckDuckGo’s IP address so that users’ conversations can’t be tracked back to any individual. DuckDuckGo AI Chat also doesn’t store any conversations, and users can delete their current chat at any time by hitting the Fire button.

DuckDuckGo is already planning to add more AI models to its AI chatbot hub, though they may be part of a new paid plan with higher usage limits. The company also said that it’s working on several new features including custom system prompts and the option to use user-hosted models.