DuckDuckGo has expanded its Duck.ai chatbot platform with new reasoning models from OpenAI. Free users now get access to GPT-5 mini, while subscribers can use the more advanced GPT-5.2. The privacy-focused service continues to offer anonymous conversations through models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI.

Duck.ai anonymizes all chats by default, stripping personal metadata like IP addresses before sending queries to model providers. This means conversations appear to come from DuckDuckGo rather than individual users, preventing any connection between user identity and chat content. The company emphasizes that conversations are never used to train AI models.

The new GPT-5.2 includes a reasoning mode toggle, allowing users to choose whether the model takes extra "thinking" steps before responding. DuckDuckGo notes this feature is optional since not every interaction requires extended reasoning. The company maintains that these AI tools remain separate from its traditional search engine platform.