DuckDuckGo Unveils AI Service to Protect Your Chatbot Conversations Privacy

DuckDuckGo has launched its new AI Chat service, allowing users to connect with popular chatbots like GPT-3.5 and Claude 3 Haiku while ensuring their anonymity. This innovative service prevents users from sharing personal information and stops AI companies from training their models on these conversations. Essentially, AI Chat acts as a high-tech intermediary in a game of telephone between users and AI.

Upon accessing the AI Chat home screen, users can choose from various chat models, including Meta’s Llama 3 70B and Mixtral 8x7B, in addition to GPT-3.5 and Claude. Users can engage with their selected model just as they would in a regular chat. DuckDuckGo connects to the chosen chat model, substituting the user's IP address with one of its own. “This way, it appears that the requests originate from us rather than you,” the company explains in a blog post.

Like DuckDuckGo’s anonymized search feature, all metadata is removed from user queries. While the company notes that “the underlying model providers may store chats temporarily,” it assures users that their identities cannot be linked to these chats. Moreover, as reported by The Verge, DuckDuckGo has established agreements with AI companies to prevent them from using chat prompts and outputs for model training, as well as committing to delete any saved data within 30 days.

Data privacy remains a critical issue in the AI landscape, as usage—both personal and professional—continues to grow. A recent Pew Research study revealed that around 80% of those familiar with AI believe corporate usage infringes on personal privacy. Although many chatbots offer users the option to opt out of data collection, these settings are often hidden within complex menus, placing the burden on users to discover and activate them.

You can access AI Chat at both duck.ai and duckduckgo.com/chat. The service is free to use within a daily limit, though DuckDuckGo is exploring the possibility of a paid option that offers higher usage limits and access to more advanced models. This launch follows the introduction of DuckAssist last year, which provides anonymized, AI-generated summaries of search results, similar to Google’s SGE.