Unlike other standalone bots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT that are powered by their own large language models, DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is not. Instead, think of it as a way to access multiple chatbots in a single place. Right now, AI chat will let you choose between OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mistral 8x7B, and the company says that more models are coming soon. The main differences between them largely boil down to how many parameters — technical speak for the settings that a large language model can tweak to give you an answer — each one has. If you don’t like a model’s answer, you can try another one.

AI Chat is free to use but is capped with the daily limit. The company said that it’s exploring a paid plan that will give access to higher limits as well as more advanced AI models. DuckDuckGo said that you can use AI Chat to ask questions, draft emails, write code, and create travel itineraries among other things, but it doesn’t generate images yet.

Not surprisingly, DuckDuckGo is stressing how private using AI Chat is compared to just using ChatGPT or Claude on their own. The company claims that your questions and the generated answers won’t be used for training AI models. “[We] call the underlying chat models on your behalf, removing your IP address completely and using our IP address instead,” wrote Nirzar Pangarkar, DuckDuckGo’s lead designer in a blog post. “This way it looks like the requests are coming from us and not you.” And if you’d rather not deal with a chatbot when you’re just trying to search anonymously, DuckDuckGo lets you easily turn the feature off.

AI Chats is separate from DuckAssist, another AI-powered feature that DuckDuckGo added last year that provides AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. It’s just like Google’s AI Overviews, the controversial new feature that recently told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza, except that DuckAssist sticks to reliable sources like Wikipedia to generate its responses. DuckDuckGo thinks that AI Chat and DuckAssist are complementary. “If you start with Search, you may want to switch to AI Chat for follow-up queries to help make sense of what you’ve read, or for quick, direct answers to new questions that weren’t covered in the web pages you saw,” wrote Pangarkar. “It’s all down to your personal preference.”

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DuckDuckGo says it won’t keep VPN logs in order to help maintain user privacy. As such, it says it has “no way to tie what you do while connected to the DuckDuckGo VPN to you as an individual — or to anything else you do on DuckDuckGo, like searching.” DuckDuckGo is using the open-source WireGuard protocol to encrypt your traffic and route it through VPN servers. As it stands, the company has VPN servers across the US, Europe and Canada. It plans to add more over time.

One subscription will cover up to five desktop and mobile devices. Rather than using an account, you’ll have a random ID that you’ll need to keep safe. If you wish, you can add an email address for easier authorization across devices. Still, you won’t need to hand over any personally identifiable information to DuckDuckGo — the company is using Stripe, Google Play and the Apple App Store to handle payments.

DuckDuckGo’s focus on protecting user privacy extends to the personal information removal tool, which removes details such as your full name, home address and birthday from people search sites and data broker services. The details you provide during the setup process stay on your device and requests to remove your personal information start directly from your desktop (for now, you need a Windows or Mac computer to set up and manage the personal information removal tool).

DuckDuckGo says this is a first for a service of its ilk, as your details aren’t stored on remote servers. To help it build the tool, DuckDuckGo bought data removal service Removaly in 2022. The personal information removal service will regularly re-scan people search sites and data brokers to see if your info pops up again, and deal with it accordingly.

As for the identity theft restoration service, DuckDuckGo will connect you with an advisor from Iris, its partner, if your identity is stolen. The advisor will help with restoring any stolen accounts and financial losses, as well as fixing your credit report. Moreover, they can help you cancel and replace important documents such as your driver’s license, bank cards and passport. Iris can also provide you with a cash advance if you’re far from home and stuck due to identity theft.

Again, you won’t have to provide any of your personal information up front. You’ll only need to provide an advisor with those details if you need help after having your identity stolen.

Expanding privacy protections through these services is a logical way for DuckDuckGo to try and boost its bottom line. Privacy Pro seems reasonably priced compared to some of the alternatives too — Mozilla’s personal information removal service alone costs $9 per month.

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Basically, DuckDuckGo users who choose it for its lack of data sharing can still get the advantages of using the same browser on multiple devices without wondering who gets access to their searches. The entire process is end-to-end encrypted, with DuckDuckGo never receiving any information as the key for decryption is stored on the individual's devices.

The update means that individuals can share information, for example, from their DuckDuckGo browser on their PC or Mac to their Android or iPhone and vice versa. Mobile phones and tablets can link with a QR code, while computers require users to enter a code. There's no need to sign in, but users will want to download a Recovery PDF. It allows people to access synced data if a device breaks, including Email Protection, which removes hidden trackers and creates unique and private email addresses.

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