I’ve been on a DuckDuckGo kick for a few weeks now. And I’m always covering AI because that’s life in 2025. So it was inevitable that I’d end up merging the two into an article delving into exactly what Duck.ai is.
Because when you think AI, you think ChatGPT, and perhaps Perplexity and Claude, not a duck…
What underpins duck.ai?
DuckDuckGo, in a nutshell, is an alternative search engine that promises it doesn’t track your search history and profit off your private data. It’s found a following with people skeeved out by Google’s omnipresence and growing omnipotence.
Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo’s in-browser AI agent that you can, thankfully, turn off or bypass entirely if you desire it. But if you want some AI integration into your search engine, Duck.ai “allows you to have private conversations with 3rd-party AI chat models, anonymized by us,” as DuckDuckGo itself put it.
It’ll offer summaries to questions you type into the search engine, help you compose an email, summarize text when you’re feeling lazy, and have conversations with it, if you want to.
You can use Duck.ai in any browser. In my time using DuckDuckGo, I’ve left it active most of the time. I’d say that its summaries at the top of the search results page haven’t been any less helpful (or accurate) than Google’s.
Past conversations are stored on your device locally and not remotely on DuckDuckGo’s (or anyone else’s) servers, and you can delete them all with the push of a single button. All that is right in character for the privacy-focused browser.
Free users of DuckDuckGo get access to Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, OpenAI’s ChatGPT GPT-5 mini and GPT-4o mini, and Mistral AI’s Mistral Small 3 24B. These aren’t the latest versions of these AI models, which is understandable given that DuckDuckGo isn’t a mega corporation and those getting free access to them aren’t paying a dime.
If you subscribe to DuckDuckGo, you also get access to more current (and therefore more advanced and powerful) AI models of Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI ChatGPT GPT-4o and GPT-5.1, and Meta Llama 4 Maverick.
For $10 per month or $100 per year, a DuckDuckGo subscription also includes a VPN, identity theft restoration, and removal of personal information from web search results.
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