DuckDuckGo has announced significant upgrades to its AI features, focusing on privacy, utility, and user choice. The company has launched Duck.ai, a free service providing anonymized access to popular chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral. This feature allows users to engage with AI without compromising their privacy.
The search engine now incorporates AI-assisted answers more prominently, sourcing information from across the web and expanding beyond Wikipedia. These answers are available for English-language queries globally, not just in the U.S., and users can customize how often they appear in search results.
Our 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 (@DuckDuckGo) March 6, 2025
Don't want to use AI? No problem, we've made it optional by design. (1/6) pic.twitter.com/ZF4zIX6fWz
DuckDuckGo's AI approach emphasizes privacy protection. The company uses proxying to anonymize user interactions with AI models, removing IP addresses and personal information. For Duck.ai, recent chats are stored locally on the user's device, not on DuckDuckGo's servers, and are not used for AI training.
The AI features are designed to be optional and customizable. Users can adjust settings to see AI-assisted answers more frequently (up to 20% of the time) or turn them off entirely. DuckDuckGo also respects publishers' wishes to opt out of being used as sources for AI-assisted answers.
These updates reflect DuckDuckGo's commitment to providing AI benefits without compromising user privacy. The company plans further improvements, including adding newer models, voice and image support, and granting models web access for Duck.ai 👀
