DDG is not in bed with microsoft. DDG uses Bing search index to show its search results alongside wikipedia and others they can.

Ecosia also uses Bing alongside its own search index. Except Mojeek, Qwant there are very few Independent search engines which don't use Bing or Google as its search index.

I'm on ecosia, it also has AI as default, at least it's easy to turn off :/