Duck.ai offers free Claude 4.5 Haiku, but GPT-5.6 requires paid plan
A viral social media post claimed that Duck.ai, an AI chat service by DuckDuckGo, offers GPT-5.6 and Claude models completely for free without account registration. An investigation into official documentation reveals this claim is misleading. While Duck.ai does allow users to access several AI models without creating an account, the free tier is limited to specific models such as Claude 4.5…
What you can do with it
AI at Work →Summarize long text documents with Duck.ai
What you get You can test different AI models for free to see which one fits your needs best.
Accesses multiple AI models from one interface with privacy-focused data handling.
- Who for
- marketers and founders
- Cost
- free tier
- Effort
- minutes
Use it for
- Summarize long text documents
- Translate content between languages
- Brainstorm creative ideas quickly
Watch out Top models like GPT-5.6 require a paid subscription; free tier has usage caps
Not for everyone Paid subscription only
Key points from the news
- GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol require a paid plan on Duck.ai, contradicting viral free claims.
- Free tier includes Claude 4.5 Haiku, GPT-5.4 mini, and Mistral Small 4 without registration.
- Chat history is stored locally by default, with optional encrypted server backup available.
Higher-performance models, including GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol, as well as Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8, require a paid subscription. The service also supports image generation, a feature not confirmed by some AI assistants during the initial investigation. Regarding privacy, Duck.ai stores chat history locally on the user's device by default. Users can enable an optional encrypted sync feature, but DuckDuckGo states it removes personally identifiable information before sending queries to model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The investigation concludes that while Duck.ai is a legitimate tool for comparing multiple AI models without registration, the assertion that all top-tier models are free is incorrect. Users should verify pricing and privacy mechanisms directly through official sources rather than relying on social media posts that may use urgency tactics to drive engagement.
[AI of Interest #01] Are GPT-5.6 and Claude completely free? I investigated the pricing and privacy of Duck.ai
note.com · 22 October 2026
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