McDonald’s was sued on 2 October in federal court in Chicago over claims that an AI pricing tool helped steer menu prices across independent franchises. The lawsuit, brought forward by Illinois man Michael Thomas, says the system amounts to illegal coordination because it relies on nonpublic pricing and sales information shared among franchise locations.
The case lands as customers keep noticing sharper price differences from one store to another. In Manhattan’s financial district, Chukwama Okeke said a value meal cost about $15, while he said the same meal was closer to $9 in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. Thomas, who is described as price conscious, said his usual order varied even within his neighborhood in DeKalb, Illinois.
The complaint says McDonald’s has built and for years deployed its own information-sharing pricing platform, drawing on millions of daily transactions to set menu prices across thousands of US restaurants. It was filed as a proposed nationwide class-action lawsuit, a move that would put the company’s pricing practices under broad legal scrutiny if a court agrees to certify it.
McDonald’s says something much narrower is happening. The company says AI does not set menu prices at its restaurants, that franchisees do, and that the tools available to them are optional and do not automate, coordinate or fix pricing. That response directly collides with the complaint’s core claim that the platform creates algorithmic price-fixing by pooling nonpublic data from restaurants that are supposed to act independently.
The divide matters because most McDonald’s US stores are independently owned, and antitrust law requires competitors to set prices on their own. A recent investigation reported that some franchise owners had been pressured to use the tools and to record when they deviated from the recommendations, but McDonald’s rejected that account and called it speculative and uninformed.
For now, the legal fight is headed into federal court, where McDonald’s will try to defeat the claims and Thomas will press for the case to proceed as a nationwide class-action lawsuit. The key question is not whether prices vary — customers already see that they do — but whether the company’s software is a lawful aid to franchisees or an unlawful system for aligning prices across thousands of restaurants.
