DuckDuckGo have rolled out a new service, DuckDuckGo AI Chat, that lets users benefit from AI chatbots without sacrificing their privacy.

DuckDuckGo is one of the leading privacy firms, on a mission to prove that protecting one’s privacy doesn’t mean not using the latest and greatest technology, as the company emphasizes in the post announcing the new service.

Our mission is to show the world that protecting your privacy online can be easy. 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. 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.

The new feature provides private, anonymous access to some of the most popular AI chatbots, with more to come.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is an anonymous way to access popular AI chatbots – currently, Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and two open-source models (Meta Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B), with more to come. This optional feature is free to use within a daily limit, and can easily be switched off.

DuckDuckGo says all chats are private, anonymized, and will not be used to train any AI model. The company is working to add support for additional models, as well as browser integration, and a possible paid plan to get around daily limits.

Best of all, rather than the aggressive approach most other companies are taking, DuckDuckGo is taking a very cautious, measured approach, ensuring users can turn the feature off if they don’t want to interact with AI chatbots at all.

In the industry-wide race to integrate generative AI, there’s a lot of pressure to add AI features just for the sake of saying you have them. We’re taking a different approach. Before adding any AI-assisted features to our products – first DuckAssist, our AI-enhanced Instant Answer, and now AI Chat – we think carefully about how to make them additive to the search and browse experience, and we roll them out cautiously to ensure this is the case. We also recognize these features aren’t for everyone, so we’ve made our AI-assisted features totally optional; if you’re not interested, you can easily switch them all off.

DuckDuckGo achieves privacy and anonymity by calling the chat models on behalf of customers, stripping out IP addresses so the AI companies can not tie queries back to a user. While AI models may store some information, DuckDuckGo has struck agreements to ensure any stored information is deleted within 30 days.

In addition, DuckDuckGo does not save or store any chats. To respond with answers and ensure all systems are working, the underlying model providers may store chats temporarily, but there’s no way for them to tie chats back to you, personally, since all metadata is removed. (Even if you enter your name or other personal information into the chat, the model providers have no way of knowing who typed it in – you, or someone else.) We have agreements in place with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the providers within 30 days, and that none of the chats made on our platform can be used to train or improve the models.

DuckDuckGo continues to be a driving force for privacy and user rights, showing that companies can be profitable without preying on their customers, and individuals can use powerful technology without sacrificing privacy.

The company deserves major kudos for creating its latest feature. Customers can use the new feature at duck.ai, duckduckgo.com/chat, or via the Chat tab on search results.