Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is doubling down on generative AI with the official release of its Duck.ai service out of beta. The AI-powered chatbot, which was announced on Thursday, is simply named Duck.ai and allows users to interact with top-of-the-line AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. The service provides AI-generated answers to questions instead of the typical list of search engine returns, employing conversational, context-specific responses.
Duck.ai subscribers can use various AI models like OpenAI’s o3-mini, Meta’s Llama 3.3, and Mistral’s Small 3 at no cost but with some limit on the number of queries a day. DuckDuckGo has indicated it is exploring the possibility of offering a paid subscription for users seeking more access to higher limits and advanced chat models. The company is also accelerating the use of generative AI across its traditional search interface, in which AI-powered text abstracts appear in search results with greater frequency.
In addition to offering AI-generated responses, DuckDuckGo values privacy and user control. The website ensures that users’ data will never be tracked and AI chat sessions will not be used for training models. The company has indicated that users will be able to switch between normal search results and the AI chat interface with just one click, offering flexibility for different search needs.
DuckDuckGo’s AI-powered search also includes settings to enable users to determine how often AI-produced answers are displayed. AI summaries are shown by default “sometimes,” although users can choose to broaden this to “often” or turn them off completely. That sort of accommodation is in line with the broader goal of continuing to uphold the company’s privacy reputation, which is to provide “private, useful, and optional AI” experiences.
One aspect of its shifting plan, DuckDuckGo also introduced a “Recent Chats” feature, which allows the user to cache their chats in the local storage of their devices. DuckDuckGo ensures no data from chats is stored in external servers and that chats will be deleted after 30 days automatically, thus reassuring privacy-mindful consumers.
As the larger AI ecosystem continues to change quickly, DuckDuckGo’s entry into generative AI mirrors the increasing trend of AI adoption in online search, but with a distinct emphasis on user privacy.
