DuckDuckGo’s privacy-enabled AI Chat is here

You’d be hard-pressed to find a company that isn’t trying to get into AI these days. But as invested as Google and Microsoft seem, their respective forays into machine learning seem rife with security concerns. DuckDuckGo, the internet’s favorite privacy-focused search engine, is dipping its toe into AI with an all-new chatbot, but as you might expect from the company, it’s arriving with a focus on keeping your data safe in mind.

Today, DuckDuckGo revealed its private AI Chat, which allows users to access AI models like Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3 completely anonymously. The company promises that everything you do with these chatbots stays between you and those various tools, and — even more vitally — isn’t used to be trained future or existing models. Considering how controversial AI training has become over the past year, it’s hard to imagine that not being a big draw for DuckDuckGo’s tools here.

DuckDuckGo addresses privacy concerns with AI use

But it’s not a perfect solution just yet

Today’s announcement does come with a couple of caveats. Although chats are not stored or logged — similar to any queries you research with the search engine — DuckDuckGo does warn that its supported models may store your conversations temporarily in order to deliver responses. The company stressed in today’s announcement that any and all metadata is fully removed from these logs, and that the agreements made when building these AI chats mean everything from servers is deleted within 30 days.

Compare these details to OpenAI’s privacy policy, however, and you can see how much of a difference this stance can make. Without even diving deep into this document, the differences become stark immediately.

Aside from these details, this app is now live and accessible to anyone interested, with a few conditions. DuckDuckGo has set a daily usage limit for the free version, but they have plans to introduce a paid version that will increase this limit. The paid plan will also offer more advanced models, aligning with DuckDuckGo’s roadmap to expand its browser entry points and chat models.

If you’re looking to try it out, you’ll find these tools at duck.ai, available through keyboard shortcuts within search, and available within the top bar of DuckDuckGo’s search engine. And if you’re absolutely sick of thinking about AI chatbots — or you’re simply not looking for another one — you can fully disable it within your settings. That’s a feature Google and others should consider adding to their own respective AI tools.

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