Worried about today’s chatbots training themselves on your personal data? To address the privacy risk, DuckDuckGo created a free and “anonymous” way for users to access several popular chatbots that won’t expose your data to AI training. 

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is designed to privatize all chats between the user and the AI model, including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and Meta’s Llama 3. "Just like searches on DuckDuckGo, all chats are completely anonymous: they cannot be traced back to any one individual,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

The company pulled this off by reaching deals with chatbot providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic to forbid them from training their AI models using the queries from DuckDuckGo users. To create another layer of protection, DuckDuckGo will also submit its own IP address, rather than the user's IP address, with each chat inquiry made. 

“In addition, DuckDuckGo does not save or store any chats,” the company said. “To respond with answers and ensure all systems are working, the underlying model providers may store chats temporarily, but there’s no way for them to tie chats back to you, personally, since all metadata is removed.”

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All the chatbot providers also agreed to delete any saved information within 30 days. 

(Credit: DuckDuckGo)

The protections are listed if you try out DuckDuckGo AI Chat. First, users can select one of four chatbot programs they can talk to. Then DuckDuckGo will show a privacy policy page, which notes, “You retain all intellectual property rights in your Prompts and Outputs.” But on the downside, no chatbot can retain a history of past conversations, due to the privacy controls. 

The company is offering the new feature through a chat tab next to the DuckDuckGo search box. And users can shut off the AI chat tab by going to the settings panel.

For now, DuckDuckGo AI Chat only has access to the older GPT 3.5 Turbo model — not the newly released GPT-4o. However, the search company is considering offering a  “paid plan for access to higher daily usage limits and more advanced models.” In the meantime, OpenAI's ChatGPT offers a way for users to opt-out of such AI model training.