McDonald's Accused of Price Fixing Using Artificial Intelligence — Reuters

A lawsuit has been filed against McDonald's in federal court in Chicago as part of a proposed nationwide class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit accuses the fast-food chain of illegally coordinating menu prices between franchise locations and company-owned restaurants.

The plaintiffs allege that McDonald's uses an artificial intelligence-based pricing system to achieve this.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges that McDonald’s violated U.S. antitrust laws by conspiring with independent franchisees to fix prices using algorithms trained on non-public data.

Last week, Reuters reported that McDonald’s pricing system uses machine learning algorithms to continuously analyze data from millions of daily transactions at nearly 14,000 restaurants in the chain.

In a statement released on Monday, McDonald’s called these allegations speculative and unfounded.

“Artificial intelligence does not set the price of a Big Mac or any other menu item,” the company stated. It noted that franchisees make their own pricing decisions, and the use of pricing recommendation tools and analytics is common across various industries.

In recent years, plaintiffs in the U.S. have filed a series of class-action lawsuits alleging that companies used algorithms or artificial intelligence to illegally coordinate prices for hotel rooms, apartment rentals, and other purchases.

Lark Turner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, stated in a press release that McDonald’s “uses its vast data sets and franchise system to squeeze every penny out of consumers, right down to the last french fry.”

This was reported by Reuters.

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