Well I'm not trying to push you, you make your own choice, but you could just not use it at work (or only use it at work) and have something different on other devices.

It just seems like a lot, especially when part of it goes to Russia and burn-the-world AI bros

Yeah I get that, but I guess it depends on how you count. Kagi has some of their own index, but mostly it's a search aggregator (like searx). They pay for queries to google etc, and use the Russian Yandex for Russian results because it's apparently the only one that gets good results in Russian. From my understanding, not searching in Russian/Russia location wouldn't trigger a search to Yandex so wouldn't give them money, so I guess it's more a principle thing than literal money to Yandex/Russia.

For AI it's the same, they pay per query. No queries means no money to AI companies, so it's more about principles than actual your money going to them (if you don't use it). Kagi doesn't force AI results on you (by default it will show AI if you end your search with a question mark, but you can disable that too).