DuckDuckGo private AI chats do not exploit your data by default

DuckDuckGo has launched private AI chats, allowing anonymous access to AI models such as GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 3 Haiku. It won’t store your chats, and the companies behind each AI model won’t be able to exploit them for training purposes – so you won’t have to jump through settings menus to opt out of them.

To keep your chats anonymous, DuckDuckGo calls chat models on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own. “This makes it look like the requests are coming from us, not you,” says DuckDuckGo. However, DuckDuckGo notes that AI providers “can temporarily store chats” but cannot associate them with you.

As noted in DuckDuckGo Privacy Policy Page, before sending the query, removes all metadata containing your personal data, including your IP address. The company also has agreements with AI vendors to delete saved chats within 30 days and prevent them from being used to train its models. Similar to the DuckDuckGo browser, you can exploit the fire button to clear your chat.

In addition to GPT-3.5 and Claude, DuckDuckGo’s AI chat also offers access to the Meta Llama 3 70B and Mixtral 8x7B. You can access DuckDuckGo’s AI chats by going to duck.ai or using the abbreviations “!ai” or “!chat bang”. It’s also located on the right side of the top menu bar of the DuckDuckGo search engine (but you can turn this option off in the settings menu).

This feature is free to exploit “within your daily limit,” but DuckDuckGo says it may eventually launch a paid plan with higher limits and access to more advanced models. The company also plans to add more chat models, including those hosted by DuckDuckGo or users. Last year, DuckDuckGo launched DuckAssist on its search engine – a feature that automatically displays AI-generated answers – as did Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.