McDonald's Faces Nationwide Class Action Over AI-Powered Menu Price Coordination

McDonald's has been sued in a proposed nationwide class action alleging the company illegally coordinated menu prices across its roughly 14,000 U.S. franchises and company-operated restaurants through an artificial intelligence-powered pricing system trained on nonpublic data. The lawsuit, filed October 5 in federal court in Chicago, seeks to represent millions of McDonald's customers who allegedly overpaid due to the coordinated pricing scheme, with average menu prices rising approximately 40 percent over five years.