Ecosia AI Chat

Ecosia AI Chat is a free chat assistant inside the Ecosia search engine, from Ecosia GmbH in Berlin. You ask a question and get a written answer instead of a list of links. You open the chat from ecosia.org or from your search results. Ecosia also sends some longer questions to the chat by itself, and you switch that off the first time it happens.

Ecosia doesn't train a model of its own, so the chat is a front end. Your requests go mainly to Mistral, and Ecosia says it also uses open-weight models without naming them. If you want everything Mistral offers, Mistral Vibe is the direct route. You'd pick Ecosia for other reasons: basic use without an account, a chat list kept in your browser unless you turn on history, and a company that says all its profits go to climate action.

You get three modes. Web Source pulls from the live web, Guided Learning walks you through a topic step by step, and Think Longer spends more time on hard questions. You upload up to 5 files per conversation, 5 MB each. With an Ecosia account you also get chat history and image generation through Black Forest Labs.

How Ecosia AI Chat handles your chats

Ecosia's help page says chats aren't used for training, "since we do not train models ourselves". Its privacy policy says Mistral doesn't store your input or output, because Ecosia uses Mistral's zero data retention option. Neither page says whether Mistral trains on those chats, so we don't call this a no-training service.

OpenAI, a US company, is Ecosia's backup when Mistral is unavailable. OpenAI keeps your input and output for 30 days. Ecosia keeps uploaded files for 7 days. It also keeps a sample of conversations, anonymised according to Ecosia, for up to 30 days to check quality, and builds anonymised data sets from parts of them. You opt out of that by email.

Worth knowing

AI Chat is a beta, and Ecosia shows it to some users only, in 35 listed countries. You might not see the chat at all. Ad blockers and strict privacy extensions also get in the way, Ecosia says.

The paid subscription is a US test and isn't on sale elsewhere. Ecosia's help page for that test lists daily limits on file uploads and thinking mode on the Free tier, with no numbers. The chat doesn't generate videos, share conversations or run deep research. Ecosia's switch for turning off all AI works on desktop only for now, with mobile promised for a later update.