Kagi, the surveillance-free, paid search company, introduces Kagi News, a free news aggregation service:

Kagi News operates on a simple principle: understanding the world requires hearing from the world. Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then use AI to distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.

Up to 12 stories in each user-selected category, published once per day at noon UTC.

Naturally, Kagi touts its privacy-focused design:

Your reading habits belong to you. We don’t track, profile, or monetize your attention. You remain the customer and not the product.

Kagi has also open sourced the web app and list of feeds that power the system.

After using it the last few days, I found many of the summaries useful, with helpful additional context, but several had a telltale smell of “AI.” For example, an “Apple” story headlined “MacOS Tahoe adds customization and Live Activities; Homebrew install tips” was an odd amalgam of barely related stories that made little sense together.

I’m not yet sure how Kagi News fits into my news consumption routine. I currently read dozens of RSS feeds every day and I can’t imagine being satisfied reading a handful of summarized stories instead. Beyond that, the selection of stories it features rarely matches my definition of “most important,” though it’s already exposed me to stories I might not have otherwise seen. It’s a promising idea, and I think it’ll be valuable to many people looking to curtail their news consumption, but it’s possible the entire concept of a “healthy news diet” is simply anathema to me.