McDonald’s faces a proposed nationwide class action lawsuit filed in Chicago federal court, alleging the company uses an artificial intelligence pricing system to coordinate menu prices. The lawsuit, filed on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026, claims the fast-food chain conspires with independent franchisees to fix prices by utilizing algorithms trained on nonpublic data.
The legal action follows reports that McDonald’s utilizes a machine-learning pricing engine to analyze millions of daily transactions across its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants. The plaintiff, a resident of Illinois, alleges that these practices violate federal antitrust laws, which require independent businesses to set their own prices.
In a statement released on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026, McDonald’s denied the allegations, characterizing them as speculative and uninformed. The company stated that AI does not set the price of its menu items and emphasized that franchisees maintain independent control over their pricing decisions. McDonald’s further noted that the use of data analytics and pricing recommendation tools is common across multiple industries.
The scale of the case involves the daily transactions of one of the world's largest fast-food networks. The lawsuit joins other recent class actions targeting the use of algorithms or AI to coordinate prices for consumer goods and services, such as hotel rooms and apartment rentals.
Currently, the litigation is in its early stages following the Oct. 2 filing. The court must still decide whether to certify the matter as a class action. No trial dates were reported in the filing.