DuckDuckGo Launches Private AI Chat Service

Duck.ai is a new service from DuckDuckGo that provides private, anonymous access to popular AI chatbots for free. It’s available on the web and is integrated with the DuckDuckGo web browser.

“DuckDuckGo’s approach to AI is to provide private, useful, and optional AI features–including chat and search instant answers–to people who want the productivity benefits of AI without the privacy risks,” DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg writes. “Now out of beta, [you can] get free, anonymized access to popular chatbots at Duck.ai. Easily move traditional search results–which now include more AI-assisted answers from web sources–to Duck.ai to continue your conversation.”

DuckDuckGo launched Duck.ai in beta last June, describing it as a hub for accessing popular AI chatbots in a more private way. With today’s release in stable, Duck.ai has been updated to use newer AI models–OpenAI GPT-4o mini and o3-mini, Meta Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku–and there’s a new Recent Chats feature that stores your conversations locally on your device instead of anywhere in the cloud.

If you like using a chat-based interface, DuckDuckGo recommends starting at Duck.ai, which is now the name of the service–it was previously called DuckDuckGo AI Chat–and works with any browser. Those chats are anonymized via proxying and never used for AI model training, Weinberg says.

Duck.ai is also accessible via the Chat icon in DuckDuckGo Search and the DuckDuckGo web browser, and there’s a widget for iOS when you install the mobile version of the browser. (With a hint that a version for Android is on the way at some point, too.)

You can also access Duck.ai through a traditional web search. Just use DuckDuckGo Search normally and you will find AI-assisted answers–previously called DuckAssist–on the results page for relevant English-language queries. You can manually click the “Assist” button under the Search box when present to trigger these AI-assisted answers. “The answers source information from across the web, and like Duck.ai, they are completely free and private, with no sign-up required,” Weinberg notes.

DuckDuckGo allows users to remove the “Chat” icon from the browser and disable AI-assisted answers from its search service if desired. It also lets publishers opt-out of AI-assisted answers while staying opted-in to search. And this is DuckDuckGo, so it’s all anonymous and private however you choose to use these services.

“When we generate AI-assisted answers, we anonymously call the underlying AI models used to summarize web sources on your behalf, so your personal information is never exposed to third parties,” Weinberg adds. “This method is called proxying. Duck.ai chats work similarly. To accomplish this technically, we remove your IP address completely and use our own IP address instead. This way, the proxied requests are coming from us, not you.”

DuckDuckGo Search and AI-assisted answers are free and do not require a login. (The company makes money from private search ads.) Duck.ai chat is also free but with daily usage limits. The company is exploring a paid plan with higher limits and access to more advanced (and more expensive) AI models.

“We are largely driving our AI roadmap based on your feedback, so please keep it coming—we appreciate it,” he concludes. “Within Duck.ai, this includes adding newer models, voice and image support, and granting models web access. For AI-assisted answers on our traditional search engine, we’re making them faster and more interactive, answering more queries, and improving when they appear automatically, including for less straightforward queries.”