Month: December 2025

• San Francisco is suing 11 major food brands, accusing the companies of fueling a public health crisis.
• It accused brands like Coca-Cola and Nestlé of selling processed foods that lead to diabetes and obesity.
• The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration cracks down on processed foods.

San Francisco is going after food brands that produce “ultra-processed foods,” accusing the companies of fueling a public health crisis.

The 64-page lawsuit, filed on December 2 by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, accused some of the country’s biggest food brands of selling dangerous, ultra-processed foods to residents of San Francisco.

It named 11 brands as defendants: The Kraft Heinz Company, Mondelez International, Post Holdings, The Coca-Cola Company, Pepsico Inc., General Mills, Nestlé, Kellanova, WK Kellogg Co., Mars Inc., and Conagra Brands.

The lawsuit said that the brands had profited from selling ultra-processed foods, which make people crave what they otherwise would not. The lawsuit accused the brands of failing to include health warnings, making fraudulent claims about the products being healthy, and of targeted marketing at children.

Products from these brands include cereals, candies, soft drinks, and ready-to-eat meals.

“They designed food to be addictive, they knew the addictive food they were engineering was making their customers sick, and they hid the truth from the public,” the lawsuit wrote, adding that taxpayers were left to foot the bill of a resulting public health crisis.

It said that ultra-processed foods majorly contribute to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses.

Chiu called for the brands to cease further deceptive marketing and pay civil penalties to the city of San Francisco.

Representatives for the 11 brands did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

The lawsuit comes as the US is clamping down on processed foods, a result of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

In April, Kennedy said he would phase out eight petroleum-based food dyes in the US by 2027. And in July, President Donald Trump said that Coca-Cola had agreed to use real cane sugar in its products in the US, instead of corn syrup that it now uses.

• Anthropic studied its engineers to assess how AI tools like Claude Code are impacting work.
• Employees said they felt more productive and had wider skills, but also shared some concerns.
• They reported worries about the impact of AI on collaboration, mentorship, and job relevance.

AI is changing work, and Anthropic studied its own staff to learn exactly how.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, Anthropic shared the findings of its August research study, which surveyed 132 of its engineers and researchers, had 53 detailed interviews, and examined the internal use of Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. The study aimed to understand how AI is transforming work at the company and society more broadly.

“We find that AI use is radically changing the nature of work for software developers, generating both hope and concern,” the blog read.

Results showed that employees felt they were more productive and “full stack,” meaning they could perform a variety of technical tasks.

For example, the study found that 27% of the work that was assisted by Claude consisted of tasks that would not have been done otherwise. These include scaling projects or nice-to-have data dashboards that would not have been cost-effective if done manually.

The Anthropic employees also reported that they could “fully delegate” 0-20% of their work to Claude, especially “easily verifiable” or “boring” tasks.

But employees also expressed concerns about how common AI assistants like Claude were becoming.

“Some found that more AI collaboration meant they collaborated less with colleagues; some wondered if they might eventually automate themselves out of a job,” the blog read.

Employees said they were worried about the “atrophy of deeper skillsets” needed to write and check code.

“When producing output is so easy and fast, it gets harder and harder to actually take the time to learn something,” one employee said, per the report.

Some employees said they missed social dynamics and mentorship opportunities.

“Claude is now the first stop for questions that used to go to colleagues,” the report said. One person told the surveyors: “I like working with people, and it’s sad that I ‘need’ them less now … More junior people don’t come to me with questions as often.”

The changes Claude Code is bringing to work inside the company also gave software engineers mixed feelings about their future relevance.

“I feel optimistic in the short term, but in the long term I think AI will end up doing everything and make me and many others irrelevant,” the blog said, quoting an employee.

Others said that it was hard to predict what their roles would look like in a few years.

Outside Anthropic, employees are showing signs of embracing AI at work and wanting more tools that could improve their productivity.

According to a January McKinsey report on AI in the workplace, 39% of the 3,613 people surveyed self-identify as “Bloomers” — people who are AI optimists who want to collaborate with their company to create responsible AI tools. Another 20% identified as people who want AI to be quickly deployed with few guardrails.

McKinsey also found that even employees who reported AI skepticism expressed familiarity with generative AI tools.