McDonald's faces an antitrust class action over its AI menu pricing
The pricing algorithm story left the trade press and arrived in federal court today, while one of the world's most-downloaded office suites made its AI position official — by shipping none.
A proposed nationwide class action accuses McDonald's of using an AI pricing system to coordinate menu prices across its franchise network — a claim that could test where "algorithmic pricing" ends and illegal price fixing begins. The suit, filed in federal court in Chicago, alleges that McDonald's violated US antitrust law by conspiring with independent franchisees to fix prices through algorithms trained on nonpublic data, with the complaint leaning directly on Reuters' investigation from last week showing a machine-learning engine that continuously analyzes millions of daily transactions across nearly 14,000 restaurants to generate per-store prices. McDonald's called the allegations "speculative and uninformed," saying flatly that "AI does not set the price of a Big Mac or any other menu item" and that franchisees make their own pricing decisions — the standard defense in this wave of cases, and precisely the argument a court would have to untangle: recommendation tools are everywhere, but if every franchisee takes recommendations from the same model trained on the same data, independent pricing starts to look like a shared algorithm. The plaintiff, an Illinois resident, seeks to represent potentially millions of customers, and the same legal theory has already produced suits against hotels and rental platforms — this is the first to hit the drive-through. We covered the underlying investigation last month — McDonald's runs AI pricing across nearly 14,000 restaurants.
The Document Foundation says "no AI" is now a feature: LibreOffice will not add artificial intelligence to its default configuration for the foreseeable future. The nonprofit behind the open-source office suite said in a blog post this week that it doesn't reject AI out of hand — users who want it can install extensions that connect the suite to local models — but that AI won't be built in, citing user privacy. The statement follows the late-August release of LibreOffice 26.8, which shipped "no artificial intelligence" as a headline feature. In a market where Microsoft and Google are racing to embed copilots into every document and spreadsheet, this is the counter-positioning: for privacy-sensitive users, governments, and anyone who just wants a word processor that doesn't phone home, the absence of AI is the selling point.
What to watch: whether other open-source productivity projects follow — and whether "no forced AI" becomes a real category label or stays a niche appeal.
Should your office suite ship AI by default, or is opting out the only acceptable policy? Tell us in the comments.
