Malaysia has announced a plan to send orangutans to its major palm oil trading partners, in an effort to demonstrate its dedication to conserving the endangered species – but the strategy is being called out before it’s even begun.The announcement was made by Malaysia’s Plantation and Commodities Minister Johari Abdul Ghani at a biodiversity forum that took place in early May. Though the precise details of the plan aren’t yet clear, it would involve sending orangutans as a “gift” to countries that import palm oil.“By introducing 'orangutan diplomacy', it directly proves to the world community that Malaysia is always committed to biodiversity conservation,” Ghani later wrote on X, likening the plan to China’s “panda diplomacy”. Much like China is the only place in the word where wild pandas live, orangutans are only found in Borneo and Sumatra. “Malaysia cannot take a defensive approach to the issue of palm oil, instead we need to show the countries of the world that Malaysia is a sustainable palm oil producer and is committed to protecting forests and environmental sustainability,” he continued.Palm oil is pretty much everywhere; according to the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), it’s in nearly 50 percent of the packaged products found in grocery stores, from foodstuffs like chocolate and pizza to the shampoo and lipstick found in the health and beauty aisle. However, the demand for palm oil has also led to large-scale deforestation on the island of Borneo (partly governed by Malaysia), home to the Bornean orangutan. Considered as a critically endangered species, its continuing decline has largely been attributed to the destruction of its forested habitat.In an effort to combat deforestation and the loss of biodiversity that comes with it, the European Union (EU) last year introduced a law to end the import of products containing palm oil – amongst other commodities – that comes from deforested land. Malaysia, the second-biggest exporter of palm oil in the world, called the law “unjust”.With Ghani suggesting the EU could be in line to receive an orangutan, the diplomacy plan could be seen as a response to the law’s introduction.However, the newly announced plan hasn’t gone without criticism.“It is obscene, repugnant and extraordinarily hypocritical to destroy rainforests where orangutans live, take them away and give them as gifts to curry favor with other nations,” said Stuart Pimm, chair of conservation ecology at Duke University, speaking to CNN. “It totally goes against how we should be protecting them and our planet.”WWF-Malaysia also released an op-ed in response to the plan, suggesting it wasn’t the best way to go about protecting the species and tackling declining biodiversity.“WWF-Malaysia is of the opinion that a more effective way for biodiversity and orangutan conservation is through improving forest management, prioritising in-situ orangutan conservation, supporting sustainable palm oil production, and increasing international fundings for conservation efforts in developing countries,” the piece reads.“Rather than sending orangutans abroad, this approach ensures the survival of the species and promotes responsible conservation practices and sustainable production.”

CNN's Oliver Darcy was furious in Wednesday night's "Reliable Sources" um, "newsletter," with his email headline attacking "The Journal Infernal." You're writing from a rung in Hell if you've written anything that could help Trump the orange Satan. This isn't the editorial page. This is the news section. Darcy began:  The Wall Street Journal owes its readers — and the public — better. The business broadsheet published and hyped a story Wednesday declaring that "behind closed doors," President Joe Biden has shown "signs of slipping." The story questioned Biden's mental acuity, playing into a GOP-propelled narrative that the 81-year-old president lacks the fitness to hold the nation's highest office. But an examination of the report reveals a glaring problem: Most of the sources reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes relied on were Republicans. In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusion based on GOP sources who, obviously, have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden's candidacy. That's not completely accurate. Linskey and Hughes explained in their story: This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.  Not only that, but the Journal reporters noted Team Biden was riding hard on the Democrats to stay "on message." The White House kept close tabs on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic lawmakers. After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths.  Darcy complained that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was prominently quoted, and that in a previous story, it was reported McCarthy said the opposite about Biden's sharpness. But readers can judge Republicans as having a partisan interest, and also suspect that Democrats aren't as willing to go on the record. But Darcy is crying foul about the whole media:  It is difficult to imagine that the newspaper, or any outlet, would run a similar story declaring that Trump is "slipping" behind the scenes based on the word of top Democratic figures — despite the fact that the Democratic leadership has demonstrated a much stronger relationship with the truth in recent years than their Republican counterparts. More broadly speaking, The Journal's piece pointed to a continued problem roiling the news media as it covers the 2024 election. Trump is permitted to fall asleep in court and make nonsensical public statements on a routine basis without any serious questions raised about his mental acuity. Meanwhile, Biden is judged on an entirely different standard. This different-standards lament is especially hilarious coming from the "Reliable Sources" team, since Darcy's old colleague Brian Stelter routinely attacked President Trump as mentally unfit and unhinged. He infamously brought on Trump-hating psychologists who insisted he was crazy and would end up killing more than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.  This quote in 2017 is especially amusing, since the people quoted in it are now the ones trashing the Journal, who have insisted "F-You, Biden's at his best ever!" “Look at the New York Daily News this morning. A column calling the President a madman. Saying that he is truly unhinged....Eugene Robinson’s column in The Washington Post. People are saying we have to talk about his health now before it’s too late. Eugene Robinson saying: ‘How long are we going to pretend that President Trump is fully rational? How long are we going to ignore the signs he’s dangerously out of control?’ And here is MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough raising the same point...That’s the question. I’m going to ask you, Jeff Greenfield. Is now the time?”— Host Brian Stelter on CNN’s Reliable Sources, December 3, 2017.

In the wake of his recent conviction, Donald Trump loudly proclaimed that his trial had been “rigged.” Trump is often prone to overheated rhetoric, but in this case, he may have been guilty of an understatement.This was as unfair a trial as this country has likely ever seen. The court allowed a massive amount of irrelevant and highly prejudicial evidence while prohibiting strong, admissible, and relevant exculpatory proof. Judge Juan Merchan’s demeanor was unfairly pro-prosecution, sustaining virtually all the state’s objections and curtly denying the defense’s.A conspiracy to promote or prevent an election has been proven. But Trump was the victim, not the perpetrator.Then, to top off the sickening prejudicial testimony, the jury instructions all but told jurors to find Trump guilty. In fact, there was no issue presented to the jury in the instructions upon which a reasonable juror could dissent from a finding of guilt.Let’s first look at the acts in question from 10,000 feet, while adopting the prosecution’s theory of Trump’s motive. Trump and his “fixer” Michael Cohen wished to pay porn star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from exposing her one-night stand with the then-non-candidate 10 years earlier. Trump, in essence, told Cohen to fix the problem, without any specification as to how, although clearly, Trump knew that Cohen would arrange to pay her for a nondisclosure agreement.Before the 2016 election, Cohen formed an LLC, funded it himself, and paid Daniels $130,000 through it. After the election, he billed the Trump Organization through an LLC for $420,000 in 12 equal monthly installments, seeking repayment per a “retainer agreement.” There was no written retainer agreement, although clearly the facts made out an oral and implied agreement to repay the “grossed up” amount, from which Cohen would also be paid fees for his services and tax liability.The Trump Organization listed the repayments as “legal expense,” sometimes per a “retainer agreement.” It is easily discerned that these notations in the record were arguably not false at all since the payments were truly legal expenses, and Cohen labeled his invoices as seeking payment through a “retainer agreement.”The law in question punishes “falsifying” business records with an “intent to defraud.” For the falsification to be a felony, the intent to defraud must include the intent to commit or conceal another crime.Oddly, there was no instruction defining “falsifying,” which should include a definition and requirement of materiality. The court instructed that the intent to defraud, which is different from mere falsity, could simply be a “general intent,” without any intent to defraud anyone out of anything. What does that mean?Moreover, the judge offered no instruction requiring willfulness or specific intent in the commission of the crime, a standard instruction requiring that the defendant know what he was doing was illegal.The “intent to defraud” must include also intent (which means knowingly) to conceal or commit another crime to constitute the felony charged. But the judge also instructed that the prosecution “need not prove that the other crime was in fact committed, aided or concealed.”Huh?So, the jury could convict if all it found was there was an innocent, immaterial falsity, without any willful, specific intent either to falsify or to defraud anyone, and not followed by another actual crime or concealment of one.Prejudicial hearsay evidenceThe “other crime” (which need not be committed) was New York Election Law section 17-152, a “conspiracy” to “promote or prevent” an election by “unlawful means.”But the court did not instruct the jury on what defines a “conspiracy,” which usually involves agreeing to commit a specific illegal act and taking at least one overt step toward it. The jury heard none of this. Why not? Because such an agreement would necessarily mean there was a specific illegal act agreed to. But the court allowed that the “illegal means” could be any one of several illegalities, not requiring agreement to any particular wrong. Pick one, any one, jury!Since any campaign involves individuals who agree to promote or prevent an election, the key issue in this case is whether Trump and Cohen’s shutting up of Daniels involved knowingly “illegal means.” Bill Clinton’s campaign, we infer, quieted a woman once or twice, but is George Stephanopoulos a felon?The Federal Elections Commission found no violation, nor did former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a reputable Democrat. So, how did the “progressive” prosecutor and a biased court trick the jury into finding a crime where none existed?Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice had prosecuted Cohen, properly so, for bank fraud related to his foundering taxi medallion business. To smear Trump, the prosecutor added to Cohen’s proper guilty plea a falsely concocted federal election crime, a gratuitous add-on. Prosecutors at the same time decided that there was no basis to prosecute National Enquirer owner David Pecker over his “catch and kill” purchase of a salacious story and agreed in writing not to prosecute Pecker for an election crime, which falsely suggests there was a crime.Both Cohen’s plea and Pecker’s non-prosecution agreement — prejudicial hearsay evidence proving a falsity that no reasonable court would have allowed — were admitted into evidence, leading any rational juror to think that an election crime had been established. Not so.The court also allowed some overheated, sensationalistic articles by Wall Street Journal reporters suggesting wrongful election conduct, even though the stories amounted to absurdly prejudicial, speculative hearsay evidence, inadmissible on multiple grounds.But when Trump’s lawyers tendered testimony of a leading elections law expert, perfectly proper expert opinion evidence, that there was no election crime — the essence of the charge against Trump — Judge Merchan prohibited it.When Cohen’s former lawyer Robert Costello tried to testify to Cohen’s various admissions that Trump had committed no crime, Merchan, with overt hostility, prevented him from giving that part of his testimony most devastating to the prosecution.Pick a crime, any crimeJust in case the jurors had not already been convinced that the court was instructing them to find a crime, the court told the jury that “Michael Cohen is an accomplice,” because “under our law ... there is evidence that he participated in a crime based upon conduct involved in the allegations here against the defendant.” How could the jury find Trump not guilty after this absurd instruction?The court instructed that Cohen’s testimony needed corroboration but then specifically instructed that the corroboration needed not prove that the defendant was guilty or that a crime was committed. In fact, all that was needed was evidence that “harmonizes the narrative of the accomplice,” even if “it does not itself tend to connect the defendant with the commission of the crime charged.”Can that “harmony” be a perfectly legal desire that Stormy Daniels be quieted? Seemingly so, even though that is not criminal. Apparently, then, the court did not require, as it should have, that Cohen be corroborated as to Trump’s guilt.Again, a conspiracy necessarily means that the illegal act be agreed upon, while the court allowed the jury to pick any one of three possible illegalities, even though there was no evidence that any one was agreed to, much less with willfulness or specific intent.One of the three possible illegalities was a campaign contribution of more than $2,700 per federal law. This contribution, the court instructed, could be a “loan or advance.” Such would logically mean that any creditor of a campaign is a contributor if it, like Cohen, allows a debt to remain open for any length of time.And, of course, we have a state court judge instructing on federal law, which is, well, unconstitutional.A second possible illegality named was a false tax record, which Merchan said could be something other than a false tax return, without further definition. So, any false business record would seem to suffice, a circular crime, since the initial false record now could be the second crime intended by the first. In case this circularity option was not obvious to the jury, the court instructed that the second crime could simply be false business records, which sounds an awful lot like the first, predicate crime. To make sure that the jury grasped this point, Merchan specifically named Cohen’s LLC documents as “false records” that could constitute the “unlawful means.” These records, however, were simply part of the companion documents to the original (allegedly) false business records charged. So, under the judge’s instructions, part of the batch of allegedly false records could be the second crime intended to be committed by the other part of the batch. Circular, much?The real conspiracyThe bottom line is that a conscientious juror would have great difficulty even considering acquitting Trump, the intended effect of inadmissible evidence, judicial hostility to the defense, and biased, improper instructions.The prosecution, declined by Cyrus Vance, was resurrected by former federal lawyer Matthew Colangelo, seemingly sent by Merrick Garland to New York to orchestrate the resuscitation of a prosecution rejected by the previous conscientious district attorney. So, a conspiracy to promote or prevent an election has been proven. But Trump was the victim, not the perpetrator. Rather, the perpetrators are those who carried out this miscarriage of justice, a show trial worse than any Stalin or Beria could dream of. This is a sad day for earnest judges across the country, and sadder still for our shredded country.

As a financial regulatory lawyer, your correspondent can confidently tell you that financial regulation is one of the most boring topics on Earth. Some aspects of the field, such as regulatory capital requirements, are incredibly dull, usually the exclusive preserve of lawyers who not only are nerds but can be identified as nerds without visual aids from several hundred yards away. Very occasionally, though, financial regulation touches the rest of the world in profound ways that are only fully recognizable in hindsight. The 2008 global financial crisis, for example, affected us all but was only completely understood by the man on the street after Hollywood takes like "The Big Short" or "Margin Call" processed the crisis in its entirety and could retell the story in easy-to-understand terms. Crypto was intended by its creators as liberation technology: liberation from banks, both central and private; liberation from intrusive questions by retailers who no longer have settlement risk; liberation from censorship by payment processors and their political overseers. Last week’s presidential veto of a congressional resolution dealing with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accounting recommendation, titled “Staff Accounting Bulletin 121” or “SAB 121,” is similarly arcane and may prove equally consequential. Not because it will lead to a financial crisis (it won’t) but because it may put Donald Trump in the White House. SAB 121 is agency interpretive guidance that states, in brief, that banks that make regulatory filings with the SEC, if they choose to “custody” crypto assets like Bitcoin or Ether on behalf of third parties, must show those assets as a liability on their balance sheets. Moreover, this liability should be periodically updated to reflect the increase or decrease in value of the asset(s) under that bank’s control. As the asset's value increases, so does the corresponding liability. The condition of bank balance sheets has been a primary concern of federal regulators ever since the crisis of 2008. By way of reminder, that crisis was caused because banks bundled trash assets like bonds backed by subprime real estate loans and held them on their books marked to 100% of their face value even though those assets were, in reality, worth considerably less. Banks are doing the exact same thing today regarding unrealized losses on low-interest loans that started to rack up as the Fed jacked rates to fight inflation. Rather than dealing with that problem, though, President Biden and the SEC think that Bitcoin is the problem and have embarked on a multiyear regulation-by-enforcement campaign to suppress the industry in the United States. Hold on, I hear you say; indeed it’s reasonable that crypto should follow the same accounting rules as any other asset on a bank’s balance sheet, right? Sure. However, banks do not ordinarily buy and sell crypto on a balance sheet. Because banks make money by making and purchasing loans, and crypto does not throw off interest, banks will not make money by holding crypto themselves but by charging a fixed fee — say, 50 basis points per year — to safeguard it for third parties. As such, the way you’d expect crypto to be treated for accounting purposes as the bank holds it is less like a T-Bill or an RMBS note that the bank itself owns and more like the gold watch you inherited from your Uncle Bob, which sits in a deposit box, which the bank does not own. There is an economic difference because balance sheet liabilities are expensive for banks and deposit liabilities are not. For balance sheet problems, banks must hold so-called “regulatory capital,” highly liquid securities like U.S. Treasuries or cash, and keep it available to frank the institution’s liabilities if they should ever fall due. The higher the asset or the worse the bank’s balance sheet, the more cash the bank needs to hold back to continue operating; since banks make money by lending cash out, the more cash they need to hold back, the higher their cost of capital becomes and the less money they make. Deposit liabilities are handled differently, presumably because the assets are always available to satisfy the demand. The institution can fully segregate client assets from its trading operations by, for example, holding the assets in an insolvency-remote fashion so the loss of the crypto assets due to some external event like an act of God or some software fault will not affect the rest of the bank. Returning to the example of the gold watch from your Uncle Bob in a safe deposit box, if SAB 121 applied to the watch, the bank would not only have to hold onto the watch; it would also have to keep the cash value of the watch and periodically re-mark the watch to market, in cash, idle and unused in a bank account under its name. Treating (off-balance sheet) crypto like (on-balance sheet) securities in this fashion makes the cost of holding crypto prohibitive for any bank. It is against that background that President Biden vetoed a formal Resolution of Disapproval passed through Congress on a meaningfully bipartisan basis, including 60-40 in the U.S. Senate, which would have permitted banks to treat custody arrangements in crypto like custody arrangements for everything else: as a deposit liability, as it should be. The passage of that bill, in turn, was a seemingly knee-jerk reaction by our legislature after a poll was released in early May showing that up to 20% of voters in swing states considered crypto a key election issue. If crypto is an issue this cycle, it is for one reason and one alone: because Donald Trump made it so. If we look at the sequence of events that led up to the SAB 121 veto, it is clear that the Trump campaign’s involvement here was cautious, incremental, and deliberate. After a flurry of back-office engagement with the industry in early February, the 45th president mentioned Bitcoin favorably for the first time in a town-hall-style forum on Fox News later that month. After receiving no negative blowback, the campaign dropped another mention on March 10 when he suggested allowing people to pay for collectible sneakers with Bitcoin in an interview with CNBC. These early signals passed without incident for the campaign and were regarded, correctly, as olive branches by the industry. Then, at the Libertarian National Convention on May 25, Trump boldly announced, to cheers, a wide-ranging policy program to protect the crypto industry, including a promise to commute early Bitcoin user Ross Ulbricht’s prison sentence from 2x life plus 45 years to time served. To say that the sector received this proposal well would be an understatement. Crypto was intended by its creators as liberation technology: liberation from banks, both central and private; liberation from intrusive questions by retailers who no longer have settlement risk; liberation from censorship by payment processors and their political overseers. It is perhaps unsurprising that a technology exhibiting such respect for its users should command those users’ loyalty; it is refreshing to see that most of our elected politicians, skewing younger, are getting that memo. What remains to be seen is whether this new technological interest group can serve as a kingmaker in an American election. The flurry of crypto activity in the last 30 days in D.C. suggests it can. If so, the politics of the near future promise to be very different from the politics of our recent past.

“They are going to convict him. They will absolutely try to put him in jail if they can. So if Trump wins the primary, what’s the plan?” I wish somebody had said that more than a year ago. Oh, yeah, I did. Over and over again. But we like our lies, don’t we? In fact, the lie is all too often the point of our political reindeer games. 'Trump is king' will the get the clicks from our base, but it won’t fill in enough circles on those ballots on Election Day. For example, a lot of us told ourselves we would never get here because we thought this was a legal process looking for a political outcome when in fact it was a political process looking for a legal outcome all along. The distinction is vital, because when the latter is true, there are a lot more thumbs on the scale on the front end to give the appearance of a legitimate public outcome on the back end. It’s the “mercy” of Thanos, and it was inevitable. So here we are in June 2024, about five months away from Election Day, and instead of assuring us that he’s about to unveil the greatest “art of the deal” ever, Donald Trump is wasting time and valuable capital going after Bob Good, one of the best congressmen the Republicans have, because of some petty and childish grievance, while most of Trump’s closest supporters have actually endorsed Good in Virginia. I can’t make that make sense, and I won’t even try. But what I will do is give the Trump campaign a plan that it should follow if it really wants to win. I love my family and its future too much not to try. Yes, I’m going to vote for Trump. I’m never going to be a fanboy for myriad reasons. But I've compared him for several years to a Samson-level character. Samson judged Israel. Samson plunged the temple of Dagon, the fish demon worshiped by the Philistines, into the ground and did away with scores of enemy soldiers. Samson defended innocent life. No, he’s not a guy you want to marry your daughter, but you can also appreciate him for the leader he was for most of his time in office (before he surrendered to the scamdemic). And oh, by the way, he also isn’t riddled with dementia. But that’s me. And I fully understand that the way I think about things often isn’t the same as the normie American who is going to decide this contest. So how do we message them going forward? The idea that the people are so on tilt that there will be uprisings in the streets and civil wars if the deep state doesn’t stop horsing around is utter nonsense. Remember COVID-19, lockdowns, masks, and the jabs that gave you that weird flutter in your heart? The comfortably numb normies couldn’t get enough of that. See the problem yet? We need to stop wandering into Little Big Horn and calling it a good time. The martyrdom of Trump is a message about the past that has already captured every voter it is going to get. Now we need to get the votes from people who are most concerned about the future, which is the same concern that happens to decide every presidential election — whether we like it or not. So here is my plan for those with ears to hear. First, don’t hold your breath for a debate on June 27. Because if Joe Biden’s body reached a resistance level to the Adderall and whatever else is in the cocktail from the White House apothecary that he can't convincingly do the "Weekend at Bernie’s" act any longer, Biden’s handlers will cancel it and say he doesn’t need to debate a convicted felon. Next, I would anticipate that Trump will be under some form of house arrest at the very least. That means his campaign will soon largely be an air war and he won’t be able to court large crowds in person. In turn, that means keep doing what you’re doing with how you're messaging your martyrdom to your base, because they’re responding, and you are making money hand over fist as a result. But you need to turn around, starting right now, and use that money while the ad rates are cheaper to ask the normies if they are better off than they were four years ago. Get to talking about issues. Because when elections are about issues, Republicans tend to win. And when elections are about personalities, Republicans tend to lose. Can you afford a car? Can you afford a house? How many jobs are you working right now? Are you worried that your son is going to come home any day now and demand that you start calling him Shirley? Trump needs to authentically reset the heart of the MAGA message, because there are more people right now who understand the need to make America great again than there were in 2016. Give the people the message they’re willing to buy — not only what you want to sell. Those are two totally different messages. I know “Trump is king” will the get the clicks from our base, but it won’t fill in enough circles on those ballots on Election Day. Time to use the all the money coming in from the Trump-as-martyr rallying cry and saturate the airwaves with the message of prosperity and freedom that will. Finally, I would anticipate that sometime between now and June 30, the Supreme Court will rule on Trump’s immunity concerning his Washington, D.C., case. To play his strongest hand out of that news cycle, I would have Trump ready to announce his choice for vice president immediately. That person will essentially become the candidate by proxy and, because he or she will be making all the public appearances an incarcerated Trump cannot, will become the face of the GOP’s future. It needs to be someone who could be president from day one. Somebody who makes the normie voters forget about the mean tweets that wouldn’t allow them to hold their nose for Trump in 2020 and will make them happy to turn the page now. But before this or any plan can be successful, we need to start taking seriously the level of threat here. We need to start believing our own existential talking points.

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Today, DuckDuckGo unveils its AI Chat, an anonymous way to access popular AI chatbots, such as Open AI's GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and two open-source models (Meta Llama 3 and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7B). According to a press release, DuckDuckGo AI can be used for free within a daily limit and easily switched off. The privacy-first company says this allows users to have private chats while no AI training is performed during the conversations. The company says it created DuckDuckGo AI to continue its mission that protecting people's privacy online can be easy. "We believe people should be able to use the Internet and other digital tools without feeling like they need to sacrifice their privacy in the process. So, we meet people where they are, developing products that add a layer of privacy to the everyday things they do online. That’s been our approach across the board," says Nirzar Pangarkar, DuckDuckGo's lead designer. How to enjoy DuckDuck Go AI Chat? To access DuckDuckGo AI Chat, you can access duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat. Once you open these pages, you can pick your chat model and start using it just like any other chat interface. The company explains that just like searches on DuckDuckGo, "all chats are completely anonymous: they cannot be traced back to any one individual." DuckDuckGo also removes your IP address by using its own, making the platform think the requests are coming from the company, not from you. Using the Fire Button, you can clear the chat and start over. The company says it doesn't save or store chats. However, the underlying model's providers may temporarily store chats, but this doesn't create ties back to you since all metadata is removed. DuckDuckGo AI Chat is free within a daily limit, but the company plans to keep the current level of access free and explore a paid plan for access to higher limits and more advanced chat models. Don't Miss: GPT-4o is the best ChatGPT model, but it has one weakness The post New DuckDuckGo AI Chat feature finally makes ChatGPT private appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Apple deals for June 2024 Today’s deals: $249 iPad, Sonos speakers from $199, $495 Apple Watch Ultra, $14 charging station, more Best Apple Watch deals for June 2024