DuckDuckGo is best known for its privacy-focussed search engine, which promises not to track what you’re doing. The company also offers a number of other privacy-centric products including a web browser and private email addresses. And, like most tech firms, it’s also jumping onto the AI bandwagon — but in a way that it claims won’t compromise your privacy.
DuckDuckGo isn’t developing its own privacy-centric AI. Instead it’s offering access to other company’s chatbots — starting with OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, Claude 3 Haiku, alongside the open-source Meta Llama 3 and Mixtral 8X7B.
The difference compared to using these chatbots elsewhere is that DuckDuckGo has promised to keep your interactions anonymous by default.That means chats are kept private, anonymized by DuckDuckGo itself.
How does DuckDuckGo protect AI data?
DuckDuckGo essentially acts as the middleman, sending what you type to the chatbot in question. That means that the bot only captures DuckDuckGo’s IP address, and not your own. The company will also remove all metadata that could contain other personal information before those chat requests are sent over.
While the chats won’t be permanently saved, DuckDuckGo has noted that some AI providers “may store chats temporarily”. Agreements with the providers mean that chats will be deleted within 30 days, which also means that the contents can’t be used for AI model training. Plus the fact DuckDuckGo is acting as that middle man means these conversations can’t be traced back to you.
DuckDuckGo AI will be free to use, but there will be a daily limit on what you can do. There are no paid options that increase those limits, or give you access to more advanced models — but the company admits that could be something it offers in the future. It also promised that more chat models will be added to its system, and may include models hosted by DuckDuckGo or its users.
DuckDuckGo AI chat is available to use right now, and you need to head to either duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat to check it out for yourself. There’s also a Chat tab on the DuckDuckGo search results page — under the search bar on the right side.
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