DuckDuckGo Now Allows You to Anonymously Communicate With Artificial Intelligence
Communication with AI has proven to be something of a privacy risk lately, with Meta admitting that it trains its AI using the conversations you have with it (among other materials posted on its services). Now, privacy-focused search engine and browser company DuckDuckGo is officially giving users the ability to regain some anonymity, but the solution has its limitations.
DuckDuckGo AI Chat , an intermediary for communicating with AI chatbots without allowing them to see some of your information, is officially leaving beta . You can use this service to communicate with OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and now Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. You don’t even need the DuckDuckGo browser to access it. Just go to duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat . Searches made on the DuckDuckGo search engine will now also include a Chat tab, which will open a conversation with the AI on the topic you’re searching for (or you can start your search using !ai or !chat).
On the page, select a chat model and discuss as usual. This is where DuckDuckGo’s privacy features come into play.
According to DuckDuckGo, “all chats are completely anonymous: they cannot be traced back to any one person.” This means that when you talk to the AI model through DuckDuckGo, the service will ask your questions on your behalf, preventing the chatbot owners from seeing your IP address. Users also have a Fire button that can be used to instantly clear the chat and start over.
DuckDuckGo also promises that chats created using its service “are not used to train any AI model.” which might make you raise an eyebrow. Even if DuckDuckGo hides your IP address, the chatbot will still send your conversations back to its servers, right?
Well, according to DuckDuckGo, the company has “agreements with all model providers ensuring that all stored chats are deleted by the providers within 30 days, and that none of the chats created on [its] platform can be used for learning or improving models.”
This is where the service reaches its limits. For example, here you won’t always get access to fully up-to-date models such as GPT-4o . The nature of these agreements means that DuckDuckGo will have to negotiate to add new chatbots to its service, although the company promises “more to come.”
Partner companies also have the option to store your chats on their servers for up to 30 days, which can be a concern even if DuckDuckGo says “all metadata has been removed.”
Still, it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to interacting with AI, especially since Meta forces users to submit essays to protect their data on their own platforms (and doesn’t even give some users that option). DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is free up to an unspecified daily limit , although DuckDuckGo says it is exploring a paid plan with higher limits and access to more advanced models.
Users who don’t want to see artificial intelligence in DuckDuckGo can disable the new feature in the search settings menu .