New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- You can't have escaped the daily headlines about how AI could spell the end of humankind, and cause no end of trouble along the way. Along with all the news about the many wars the world is embroiled in, it makes for frightening reading.

In a moment of flippancy, I thought I'd relieve the constant doom anxiety by asking all the AI chatbots on my devices what they thought of the threat from themselves and their larger cousins. I posed the exact same question to ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Meta and Claude: Does AI pose a threat to humans? All six gave a confident YES. I'm afraid that didn't do much for my anxiety at all.

Perplexity actually said 'Yes, but.' and Claude said 'Yes, in some ways', which scared me ...