Assistant.kagi.com Subdomain

Hanbyeol

I've read several messages on Discord from people who report that Kagi is being blocked as an AI tool on corporate networks and other heavily monitored environments.

I think it would be helpful to provide a separate domain for the Assistant, similar to how DuckDuckGo uses the duck.ai domain.

xJustxMegx

I didn't see this myself (yet) on Discord. Do you maybe have some resouces (screenshots?) of where it did get reported? Might also help the staff to see how much it happen.

nobodywasishere

Maybe similar to https://kagifeedback.org/d/3285-safe-search-dns-locking-for-it-administrators we could have a DNS setting to disable AI features for environments where they're not allowed? It's something we can look into.

Having a separate domain would help with this, but there's still the nature of integrated AI features, such as Quick Answer.

Hanbyeol

(Here's a screenshot for people who aren't on Discord, so they can see what's going on)

madhatter

Hanbyeol

How would that work? DDG has AI chat under the main domain too:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fsdf&ia=chat

keawade

Seeing as how fresh this thread and reports are, I'm guessing a firewall provider recently added Kagi to an AI category.

I personally ran into this when I got into work this morning. Kagi is now blocked on my company's corporate network under "AI Category".

On the one hand, I fully understand corporate IT needing to restrict AI use to only vetted vendors.

On the other hand, this means that Kagi is now under a blanket block by my corporate IT because it has an AI offering that isn't clearly separable from the non AI offerings.

Hanbyeol

madhatter

Sorry, I should probably rephrase that. What I mean is that Kagi should move it from kagi.com/assistant to a separate (sub)domain, so that kagi.com itself doesn't get blanket-blocked, like keawade mentioned above.

Hanbyeol

Also DDG already has noai.duckduckgo.com, so that may have been taken into account by firewall/security providers as well.

keawade

Hanbyeol I think this sort of approach could be helpful. I work for a big corporation who's internal IT policies and practices result in a massive headache of forms and approvals for anyone trying to get exceptions to website blocks etc.

So having a clear "no AI" subdomain or something like that could help make appeals easier as you don't have to explain what Kagi is, why some users prefer it, how it isn't violating internal AI use policies, etc. You can just say "Hey, this doesn't have AI and is clearly labeled as such" and sidestep some of the complications of large lumbering org policies.

freijon

I'm impacted by this as well. Tried to start my work with an email translation only to find out that all Kagi services are suddenly blocked. It's a shame, 80% of my Kagi activity was from work...

summerisle

A major cybersecurity vendor's DLP product has classified Kagi.com as "Generative AI" and thus sandboxes the website, such that no text can be inserted for DLP purposes. This is somewhat excessive considering that other search engines do not receive this treatment; however, it is worth noting that most other comparable services serve features like FastGPT and the assistant from subdomains or dedicated domains (i.e. duck.ai). The internet security product directs traffic based on DNS Names, and therefore it is likely that Kagi can only be reclassified if generative AI products are at separate DNS names (i.e. assistant.kagi.com) instead of paths beneath the primary domain, as it is otherwise not possible to apply DLP controls. This reclassification impacts the usability of Kagi in the large number of enterprises which use this product.

Using Kagi in environments with specific security policies at odds with secondary (i.e. not strictly search) features such as the assistant.

jbest

Agree, separate subdomains for genAI functionality would help to allow core search while limiting genAI features that aren't as easily governable. We're running into the same issue at my work (Zscaler is categorizing all of Kagi as AI/ML, blocking search). I'm sure other tools are doing the same.

summerisle

The vendor mentioned in my prior post has conducted a review of the domain and has restated their opinion that kagi.com is (to paraphrase) "primarily concerned with generative AI solutions."