DuckDuckGo has officially launched its AI chat service, Duck.ai, making it widely available after a successful beta phase.
The privacy-focused search company also enhances AI-assisted answers in its search engine, offering users more ways to access AI-generated insights while maintaining anonymity.
Private portal to industry-leading chatbots
The announcement earlier today reinforces DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy by ensuring that AI interactions remain anonymous. Duck.ai now provides free, proxied access to multiple AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini and o3-mini, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3.3, and Mistral Small 3. Users can access the chat service directly at Duck.ai without an account, and recent conversations are stored locally on the user’s device rather than on DuckDuckGo’s servers. Additionally, the company has introduced a “Recent Chats” feature, allowing users to pick up previous conversations without compromising privacy.
DuckDuckGo, known for its privacy-first search engine and browser, has expanded AI-assisted search features to serve millions of AI-powered answers daily. Previously branded as DuckAssist, these AI-generated summaries now pull information from a wider range of web sources beyond Wikipedia. The feature is available for English-language queries outside the U.S. and allows users to customize its frequency in search settings, choosing from options such as “Often,” “Sometimes” (default), “On-Demand,” or “Never.”
The company highlights that all AI interactions are proxied to prevent personal data exposure. Requests made through Duck.ai or AI-assisted search results are stripped of metadata, and model providers must delete any temporarily stored chat data within 30 days under DuckDuckGo’s privacy agreements. Additionally, DuckDuckGo respects publisher preferences by allowing them to opt out of AI-assisted answers while remaining in traditional search results.
Users can access Duck.ai directly through chat icons in DuckDuckGo’s browsers or via the !ai and !chat bang search commands. AI-assisted answers in search results can be manually triggered via the “Assist” button under the search box.
DuckDuckGo is also considering a paid plan to offer higher usage limits and access to more advanced models. Future updates may include voice and image support, real-time web access for AI models, and improved AI-assisted search responses. As AI continues to play a larger role in search and online interactions, DuckDuckGo aims to balance innovation with its core promise of user privacy.
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This is how private search engines should work that is being a proxy where data providers only see the proxy or intermediary not the end user. Many private search engines claim to be private by not collecting data on users but their providers actually do.