New York McDonald’s Customers Caught Up In AI Pricing Lawsuit

If your McDonald's bill has felt a lot heavier lately, a new federal lawsuit says that's not an accident.

A class-action suit filed this month impacts all New Yorkers who eat at McDonald's.

Now A Lawsuit About The McDonald's Price Hike You've Been Feeling In The Hudson Valley

If you've wondered how a Big Mac and medium fries got so expensive, a new federal lawsuit is asking the same question.

A class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago accuses McDonald's of using an AI-powered pricing system to illegally coordinate and inflate menu prices across its nearly 14,000 U.S. restaurants, including the dozens of locations serving Hudson Valley and New York customers every day.

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The suit alleges that McDonald's violated federal antitrust law by conspiring with its independent franchisees to fix prices through a machine-learning pricing engine trained on proprietary transaction data collected from millions of daily customer purchases across the entire McDonald's network.

The plaintiff argues that by feeding non-public sales data from every location into a shared algorithm, McDonald's effectively eliminated the local price competition that's supposed to exist between independently owned franchises.

Numbers Behind Lawsuit

According to numbers in the lawsuit, McDonald's prices in the United States surged roughly 40 percent between 2019 and 2024.

A Big Mac went from $4.39 to $5.29, a 21 percent jump, while medium fries climbed from $2.29 to $3.29, a 44 percent increase.

The plaintiff's lawyer says McDonald's is "leveraging its data to nickel-and-dime consumers down to the last French fry."

McDonald's Reveals Presence Of Possible Allergens In Fries — Getty Images

The lawsuit also cites a Reuters investigation that found franchisees felt pressured to follow the AI system's pricing recommendations, that internal company documents tracked when operators departed from the algorithm's suggested prices, and that the system reportedly became mandatory in January 2026.

McDonald's Pushing Back Hard

McDonald's called the lawsuit "speculative and uninformed" and said flat out that "AI does not set the price of a Big Mac or any other menu item."

McDonald's says its machine-learning tools only analyze variables like sales trends, local price sensitivity, and nearby competitor pricing to make recommendations.