DuckDuckGo Launches Duck AI. Now their Hit Product is ‘No AI’

DuckDuckGo became the better part of 2024 Duck.aiAn anonymous chatbot that lets you chat privately with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models. And now, this past weekend, it launched a Chrome extension to help you pretend that AI doesn’t exist.

And it seems to be going well.

Additional, called DuckDuckGo No-AI searchsets your search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com—DuckDuckGo’s AI-free subdomain. You get search results, the same results, the same features, minus the AI-generated image results, the AI ​​Assist summary, and everything else that the company has added in the last two years. A version of Firefox was launched on the same day.

If you later want to change the AI ​​mode or turn it off instead of disabling everything, DuckDuckGo has it all. Privacy Essentials extension– which also blocks trackers – allows you to do just that.

Punctuality is no accident. Google has revealed what it calls “The biggest upgrade to the Search box in over 25 years” at I/O in early May—replacing blue links with AI assistants, expanding message boxes, and a chat summary that answers questions before you finish typing. Most people hated it. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg was, of course, one of them.

“Google is force-feeding AI with no way out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better,” Weinberg said. Paul Therrot. “We want to be a place that puts users in control and lets them choose the AI ​​they want or want.”

Drive to noai.duckduckgo.com three times on May 28– a new record – and has been about 84% higher since then.

DuckDuckGo app installs in the US jumped 18.1% for the week on average between May 20 and May 25, with iOS installs reaching 69.9% in one day, Results TechCrunch. “Since Google revealed its plans to revamp AI search, visits to our “No AI” site have tripled… tweeted.

AI Diseases

DuckDuckGo isn’t the only company cashing in on the anti-AI campaign. Brave launched Brave Origin in April, a $59.99 one-time purchase that strips its browser down to the basics: ad blocking, Brave Shields, and everything else. No Leo AI support, no crypto wallet, no Brave Rewards, no VPN, no telemetry, no Brave News.

People seem to be happy to pay for a browser version that has removed content.

Brave CTO Brian Bondy acknowledged the obvious conflict: The company makes money from Leo AI, Brave Wallet, Brave Talk, its VPN, and crypto partnerships. Origin removes all of that. A $60 fee covers the lost revenue. It’s available on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—and, interestingly, for free on Linux, where the open source community knows how to do it themselves.

Mozilla, meanwhile, is taking a more stealthy approach. Project NovaFirefox’s first major update since 2021, will include a single Settings change that disables all current and future AI features simultaneously. The renovation is expected to be launched later this year.

However, Mozilla is not giving up on AI – its free VPN and encryption tools are available for users who need them – but it is developing “random” as a competitive advantage.

DuckDuckGo’s true position on AI is much more than the expansion implies. The company is still offering Duck.ai, a private chatbot with access to the GPT-4o mini, Claude 4.5 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 4 Scout, and Mistral Small 3 24B for free within a daily limit, with premium plans unlocking the Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and-on top Opus.

It also developed DuckAssist for AI-powered search shortcuts. The tagline on Chrome’s extension list—”AI should be optional”—is marketing wisdom and a direct acknowledgment that DuckDuckGo has a lot of AI to pull from.

What all three companies are selling, in different packages, is the same thing: the freedom to use software that doesn’t think you need AI.