Yeah, the CEO of Kagi being hyped about AI made me worried about its future as well. I think you can disable all of that, but I want a search engine that is being built by people whose goal is to help me find things that real people, and real people only, have written.

With a paid search engine, it's hard to see a way around the problem of needing an account, unfortunately. Maybe it could just be an API key? Mullvad VPN does something like that. You have no username or password, just a long ID that you need to keep secret. And they are disposable -- you can just stop using it and buy a different API key next month.