Days after McDonald's publicly insisted that artificial intelligence does not decide what you pay for a Big Mac, the burger giant has been sued over its AI pricing tool. A proposed nationwide class action claims the chain uses it to coordinate menu prices across its US restaurants, a claim the company flatly denies.
The suit was filed on 2 October in federal court in Chicago by Michael Thomas, an Illinois resident seeking to represent potentially millions of McDonald's customers nationwide. It accuses the company of breaking US antitrust law by conspiring with its independent franchisees to fix prices through algorithms trained on nonpublic data, and is seeking damages for the proposed class.
