DuckDuckGo expands Duck.ai with GPT-5.2 and reasoning mode toggle

DuckDuckGo

• Duck.ai adds GPT-5 mini for free users, GPT-5.2 for subscribers
• GPT-5.2 offers subscribers deeper or faster reply options.
• Duck.ai anonymises chats, protecting user privacy by default

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DuckDuckGo is giving its AI chatbot platform, Duck.ai, a meaningful upgrade—adding more capable reasoning models while keeping its core pitch intact: privacy-first AI. Duck.ai now includes GPT-5 mini for free users and GPT-5.2 for subscribers, bringing stronger reasoning capabilities to the platform.

The highlight here is “reasoning mode,” which allows the model to take extra steps before responding—useful for more complex queries. Subscribers using GPT-5.2 can toggle this mode on or off, depending on whether they want deeper thinking or faster replies.

It’s a small but practical addition, especially in cases where not every prompt needs heavy processing.

How Duck.ai works (and why privacy is the pitch)

If you haven’t used it before, Duck.ai is DuckDuckGo’s chatbot interface that provides access to models from multiple providers, including Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI. The company’s big differentiator is privacy.

According to DuckDuckGo, chats are anonymised by default. Personal metadata—like IP addresses—is stripped out before requests are sent to model providers. In effect, conversations appear to come from DuckDuckGo itself, not individual users.

That also means prompts containing personal information aren’t tied back to a specific user identity, at least at the platform level.

How features have expanded beyond basic chat

Over the past few months, Duck.ai has evolved from a simple chatbot into a more feature-rich tool. It now supports Voice conversations, image generation, and image editing. The addition of stronger reasoning models builds on that, making the platform more capable without changing how it fundamentally works.

How DuckDuckGo is positioning AI differently

DuckDuckGo is also being careful about positioning. The company continues to emphasise that Duck.ai is optional and separate from its core search engine experience. That’s notable at a time when most competitors are aggressively integrating AI into search by default. With this update, Duck.ai becomes a more serious option for users who want access to multiple AI models—without giving up control over their data.