DuckDuckGo Launched Duck AI. Now Their Hit Product is 'No AI' – Decrypt

DuckDuckGo spent the higher a part of 2024 constructing Duck.ai, an nameless chatbot that permits you to chat privately with fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. And now, simply this previous weekend, it launched a Chrome extension that will help you fake AI doesn’t exist.

And issues appear to be understanding.

The extension, referred to as DuckDuckGo No-AI Search, units your default search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com—DuckDuckGo’s AI-free subdomain. You get the search index, similar outcomes, similar interface, minus the AI-generated picture outcomes, the AI Help summaries, and each different function the corporate added previously two years. A Firefox model launched the identical day.

For those who later need to toggle particular person AI options on or off moderately than block all the pieces, DuckDuckGo’s full-featured Privateness Necessities extension—which additionally blocks trackers—helps you to do this.

The timing wasn’t unintended. Google unveiled what it referred to as “the most important improve to its Search field in over 25 years” at I/O earlier in Could—changing conventional blue hyperlinks with AI brokers, increasing textual content bins, and conversational summaries that reply questions earlier than you even end typing. Lots of people hated it. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg was, after all, one in all them.

“Google is force-feeding AI with no strategy to decide out. Because of this, their outcomes are getting worse, not higher,” Weinberg instructed Paul Therrot. “We need to be the place that places customers in cost and permits them to determine how a lot or how little AI they need.”

Visitors to noai.duckduckgo.com tripled on Could 28—a brand new file—and has been averaging 84% above its regular baseline ever since.

DuckDuckGo app installs within the U.S. jumped 18.1% week-over-week on common between Could 20 and Could 25, with iOS installs peaking at 69.9% on a single day, per TechCrunch. “Since Google revealed its plans for an AI search overhaul, visits to our “No AI” search web page have tripled…and so they’re nonetheless rising,” the official Duckduckgo account tweeted.

AI Illness

DuckDuckGo is not the one firm being profitable off the anti-AI crowd. Courageous launched Courageous Origin in April, a $59.99 one-time buy that strips its browser right down to the fundamentals: advert blocking, Courageous Shields, and nothing else. No Leo AI assistant, no crypto pockets, no Courageous Rewards, no VPN, no telemetry, no Courageous Information.

Folks appear to be pleased to pay for a model of the browser that has had issues taken out of it.

Courageous CTO Brian Bondy acknowledged the apparent rigidity: The corporate generates income from Leo AI, Courageous Pockets, Courageous Speak, its VPN, and crypto partnerships. Origin removes all of that. The $60 charge compensates for that misplaced income. It is accessible on Home windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—and, in a enjoyable twist, fully free on Linux, the place the open-source neighborhood is aware of methods to do it by themselves anyway.

Mozilla, in the meantime, is taking the subtler route. Mission Nova, Firefox’s first main redesign since 2021, will embody a single Settings toggle that disables each present and future AI function without delay. The redesign is anticipated to roll out later this 12 months.

Nonetheless, Mozilla is not abandoning AI both—its free built-in VPN and summarization instruments keep accessible for customers who need them—but it surely’s framing “off by default” as a aggressive benefit.

DuckDuckGo’s precise place on AI is extra nuanced than the extension implies. The corporate nonetheless affords Duck.ai, a personal chatbot with entry to GPT-4o mini, Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, and Mistral Small 3 24B totally free inside every day limits, with premium plans unlocking Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and—on the highest tier—Claude Opus.

It additionally constructed DuckAssist for AI-generated search summaries. The assertion on the extension’s Chrome itemizing—”AI ought to be elective”—is each a product philosophy and a direct acknowledgment that DuckDuckGo has loads of AI to decide out of.

What all three corporations are promoting, in numerous packaging, is identical factor: the correct to make use of software program that does not assume you need AI.