If you don’t trust Big Tech with your data, this is the chatbot for you

Sure, when chatbots aren’t outright hallucinating, they can be helpful tools for gathering information, generating ideas, and completing tasks.

But some of the biggest players in the AI chatbot space—including OpenAI, Google, and Meta—aren’t exactly known for strong privacy protections. So you have to have a lot of blind faith that the data you give to their chatbots won’t be used in ways you might not like, such as building a profile around you and your prompt history for the purposes of advertising or tracking.

So, what’s a person to do if they don’t trust Big Tech with their chatbot data? Give up AI chatbots entirely? Luckily, they don’t have to.

I’ve been testing out a relatively small player in the AI chatbot market for a few weeks now called Duck.ai. It offers access to some of the most powerful LLMs out there while protecting my privacy from them.

Now, I can’t imagine myself ever going back to using one of the behemoths directly.

ChatGPT without the privacy fears

DuckDuckGo is best known for its privacy-focused search engine. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your search history or create a profile of your online activity. This privacy-first approach is one reason Apple, another company that values user privacy, allows people to set DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in its Safari browser—and it’s the main reason many choose DuckDuckGo, which was founded in 2008, over Google.

A few years ago, DuckDuckGo entered the AI chatbot market with the launch of Duck.ai. This chatbot differs from most major ones, such as ChatGPT from OpenAI or Gemini from Google, in two key ways.

The first is that Duck.ai doesn’t have its own “DuckDuckGo” LLM. While its interface is nearly identical to most chatbot interfaces—with a prompt box in the center and a sidebar on the left showing your chat history—Duck.ai features a drop-down menu that lets you choose among various LLM models. You can pick from six free models for each new prompt, with five additional models available if you subscribe to DuckDuckGo’s VPN service, which costs $9.99 per month or $99 per year.

In other words, Duck.ai is an LLM aggregator. You use a single interface, but with each new prompt you can choose a different LLM to respond. Free options include OpenAI’s ChatGPT GPT-4o mini and GPT-5 mini, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, and Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, among others. Subscribers gain access to additional models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT GPT-4o, GPT-5.2, and GPT-5.2 Thinking, as well as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick.

The convenience of not having to switch among different websites—and of keeping your entire conversation history across multiple LLMs in one place—is enough reason to love Duck.ai.

But as you might have surmised by now, the main advantage of the Duck.ai chatbot is privacy. If you’ve ever wished you could use Meta’s or OpenAI’s LLMs without those companies tracking you—well, now, you can.

Duck.ai keeps your prompts private

Even though Duck.ai allows you to use various versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT models, OpenAI will never know that you, specifically, are the one typing the prompts (provided you don’t directly or indirectly identify yourself through the prompts themselves). That’s because no matter which model you select in Duck.ai, DuckDuckGo strips all metadata from your query before sending your prompt to the LLM provider for processing. Critically, this metadata includes your IP address, which is one of the main ways Big Tech companies know when the same person is using their services.

But Duck.ai goes further in protecting your privacy. In addition to stripping metadata from your prompts, DuckDuckGo will not use your queries to train any of its AI, and DuckDuckGo also has agreements in place with the model providers it works with to ensure that none of your prompts or associated data is used to train their AI models. Those agreements also state that the model providers must delete your anonymized prompts within 30 days (subject to legal and safety compliance rules).

But there’s a third huge advantage of using Duck.ai. For most LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, if you want the chatbot to save your chat history so that you can reference your chats in the future, you need to create an account. But by creating that account, the chatbot provider knows who you are.

Duck.ai allows even anonymous users to store their chat history. It can do this because Duck.ai chats are stored locally on the user’s device (their laptop or phone) and not on Duck.ai’s servers. This means that while Duck.ai and its LLM providers will never keep a record of your chats, you can still maintain one yourself (provided you don’t clear your browser’s cache).

Of course, users can also choose to disable local saved history on their devices so that others who use the same computer can’t see their prompting history. And Duck.ai even provides a one-click “burn” button to quickly wipe a chat from your computer.

So, what are the drawbacks?

After using Duck.ai for a few weeks, it’s become my go-to chatbot. However, there are some important caveats I should add to that statement.

First, I don’t consider myself a “heavy” chatbot user. I mostly use it for quick searches or light research (and almost never trust the results without fact-checking them with external sources).

My relatively light chatbot usage means I don’t require the latest and greatest AI models. If you do, then Duck.ai might not be for you. That’s because the “free” models every user of Duck.ai has access to are old by LLM standards (for example, OpenAI’s GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini came out nearly two years ago).

Those who subscribe to DuckDuckGo’s VPN service (which also offers identity theft restoration services) have access to newer models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 /Thinking. However, even that model is several months old and has been surpassed by GPT-5.3 and GPT-5.4.

A second caveat is that while Duck.ai offers LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, among others, it doesn’t bring together all the most popular chatbots in one place. For example, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Google’s Gemini are not options in Duck.ai. If you use those LLMs, Duck.ai is not currently suitable for you.

But aside from those caveats, Duck.ai is an excellent choice for people like me—“average” users who are fine with any capable LLM and who, above all, prioritize privacy.