“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,” the post reads. “Creating products that add a layer of privacy to the everyday activities they do online…first search, then browsing, email, and now AI chat with creative AI.”

“In the industry-wide race to integrate generative AI, there’s a lot of pressure to add AI features just to say you have them. We’re taking a different approach.” – DuckDuckGo

How to use DuckDuckGo AI Chat

This feature – which is optional and can be turned off – is powered by duck.ai, duckduckgo.com/chat or via the company’s ‘bang’ shortcuts (!ai and !chat).

Once you’re there, you can make your anonymous inquiry with a few simple steps:

1. Select a chat model. (Currently available are Open AI’s ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku and open source models Meta Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B)
2. Check and agree to DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
3. Enter your query or use the prompts provided.

It’s really that simple. If you’ve used AI chatbots before, these will all be very familiar and you still have the option to edit, narrow or speed up your questions as usual.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is currently free to use, although the company is enforcing an unspecified daily limit. It says it aims to maintain a free tier in the future, but is “exploring a paid plan to access higher limits and more advanced (and expensive) chat models.”