McDonald's has been using AI since 2019 to decide how much you pay for a Big Mac

A Reuters investigation, based on testimony from franchise owners and on August screenshots of an internal tool, reveals that McDonald's has used an artificial intelligence system since 2019 to guide the prices charged at its nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States. The system analyzes data from millions of the chain's own transactions and cross-references that information with the online menus of nearby rivals, such as Wendy's, to estimate how much customers in each area are willing to pay. The tool goes as far as classifying a restaurant as having "medium sensitivity" to prices based on the "willingness to pay" of its local customer base.

The result, according to the report, is a price spread that can be striking even between outlets located very close to one another: in Fresno, California, a McDonald's run directly by the company sold the Big Mac for $5.69, while another restaurant just two miles away charged $6.89 for it, 21% more. The company maintains that each franchisee retains the freedom to set its own prices, with or without the algorithm's support, based on local costs.

The sources consulted by Reuters, however, considerably qualify that official version. Several franchise owners explain that the pressure to follow the algorithm's recommendations is real: they describe phone calls from headquarters asking why they deviated from the suggested price, and say McDonald's tracks those deviations in detail. That traceability would not be merely informational, since according to the article it could influence whether a franchisee is allowed to open new restaurants, turning price tracking into a de facto negotiating lever even when participation in the system is formally voluntary. The most extreme case cited is that of a franchisee who sued the company after feeling pressured to charge $18 at an outlet located next to a toll highway in Connecticut.

The report also focuses on a legal risk that McDonald's itself acknowledges: the possibility that the shared use of the same pricing algorithm among nearby restaurants could be interpreted as price-fixing or collusion, practices prohibited under antitrust law. The company explicitly tells its franchisees that they must comply with those laws and warns them that nearby outlets may be considered competitors of one another, a precaution that by itself illustrates how delicate the ground is for this kind of algorithmic pricing when applied to a network of establishments that, although under the same brand, are supposed to compete independently.

The Wendy's case adds a relevant nuance to the debate: the rival chain says it does not currently use AI to set prices, but in 2024 it already had to deal with controversy after announcing plans to test dynamic pricing, an idea that drew considerable public backlash at the time. That McDonald's has operated this system far more discreetly suggests the company is aware of how sensitive the issue is for consumers and prefers to avoid the media exposure its rival endured.

This episode adds to a series of attempts, not always successful, by McDonald's to bring AI into different parts of its business. In 2024 the company ended an agreement with IBM to take orders via chatbots (a similar service that DoorDash now plans to offer through Apple Messages). In 2025, a chatbot used in the chain's hiring processes exposed the personal data of 64 million job applicants, and later that same year the company pulled an AI-generated Christmas ad after a strong public backlash. The pattern these episodes trace is that of a company willing to experiment aggressively with artificial intelligence across very different areas of its operations—customer-facing and behind the scenes—with uneven results and, in the case of dynamic pricing, with a far more lasting application of greater economic significance than the company's public image suggests.