The complaint from the National Labor Relations Board claims that Amazon is a so-called “joint employer” of drivers employed by the contractor, Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), and used a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities at a facility in Palmdale, California.

BTS drivers voted to join the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union last year, becoming the first Amazon delivery contractors to unionize.

The NLRB in the complaint, which was issued on Monday, said Amazon broke the law by terminating its contract with BTS after the drivers unionized without first bargaining with the Teamsters.

The board in August had said that it had found merit to the union’s claims that Amazon exerts control over BTS drivers and should be considered their employer under federal labor law. The NLRB at the time said it would issue a complaint unless Amazon settled the case.

Last month, the board said it planned to issue a second complaint involving a different group of Amazon drivers.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has said in the past that it does not have enough control over drivers’ working conditions to be considered their joint employer.

Joint employment has been one of the most contentious U.S. labor issues over the last decade, and the NLRB’s standard for determining when companies qualify as joint employers has shifted numerous times since the Obama administration. Business groups favor a test that requires direct and immediate control over workers, while unions and Democrats back a standard that covers indirect forms of control.

The case will be heard by an administrative judge in Los Angeles, who is scheduled to hold an initial hearing next March. The judge’s decision can be reviewed by the five-member NLRB, whose rulings can be appealed to federal court.

A ruling that Amazon is a joint employer under federal labor law could be applied in cases involving other Amazon contractors and force the company to bargain with drivers’ unions.

The board, meanwhile, is facing claims by a growing number of companies, including Amazon, that its structure and in-house enforcement proceedings violate the U.S. Constitution.

Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the board seeking to block it from deciding whether the company must bargain with a union representing workers at a New York City warehouse. A federal appeals court on Monday temporarily blocked the NLRB from ruling while it reviews Amazon’s claims.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon finally has its answer to ChatGPT.

The tech giant said Tuesday it will launch Q — a business chatbot powered by generative artificial intelligence.

The announcement, made in Las Vegas at an annual conference the company hosts for its AWS cloud computing service, represents Amazon’s response to rivals who’ve rolled out chatbots that have captured the public’s attention.

San Francisco startup OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT a year ago sparked a surge of public and business interest in generative AI tools that can spit out emails, marketing pitches, essays, and other passages of text that resemble the work of humans.

That attention initially gave an advantage to OpenAI’s chief partner and financial backer, Microsoft, which has rights to the underlying technology behind ChatGPT and has used it to build its own generative AI tools known as Copilot. But it also spurred competitors like Google to launch their own versions.

These chatbots are a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they’ve learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.

Amazon said Tuesday that Q can do things like synthesize content, streamline day-to-day communications and help employees with tasks like generating blog posts. It said companies can also connect Q to their own data and systems to get a tailored experience that’s more relevant to their business.

The technology is currently available for preview.

While Amazon is ahead of rivals Microsoft and Google as the dominant cloud computing provider, it’s not perceived as the leader in the AI research that’s led to advancements in generative AI.

A recent Stanford University index that measured the transparency of the top 10 foundational AI models, including Amazon’s Titan, ranked Amazon at the bottom. Stanford researchers said less transparency can make it harder for customers that want to use the technology to know if they can safely rely on it, among other problems.

The company, meanwhile, has been forging forward. In September, Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, a San Francisco-based company that was founded by former staffers from OpenAI.

The tech giant also has been rolling out new services, including an update for its popular assistant Alexa so users can have more human-like conversations and AI-generated summaries of product reviews for consumers.

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Amazon will soon make prescription drugs fall from the sky when the e-commerce giant becomes the latest company to test drone deliveries for medications.

The company said Wednesday that customers in College Station, Texas, can now get prescriptions delivered by a drone within an hour of placing their order.

The drone, programed to fly from a delivery center with a secure pharmacy, will travel to the customer’s address, descend to a height of about four meters — or 13 feet — and drop a padded package.

Amazon says customers will be able to choose from more than 500 medications, a list that includes common treatments for conditions like the flu or pneumonia, but not controlled substances.

The company’s Prime Air division began testing drone deliveries of common household items last December in College Station and Lockeford, California. Amazon spokesperson Jessica Bardoulas said the company has made thousands of deliveries since launching the service, and is expanding it to include prescriptions based in part on customer requests.

Later on Wednesday, Amazon announced it will also launch drone delivery at a third U.S. location and cities in Italy and the United Kingdom by the end of next year. The company said it will disclose the exact locations in the coming months.

Amazon Prime already delivers some medications from the company’s pharmacy inside of two days. But pharmacy Vice President John Love said that doesn’t help someone with an acute illness like the flu.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out how can we bend the curve on speed,” he said.

Amazon Pharmacy Chief Medical Officer Dr. Vin Gupta says the U.S. health care system generally struggles with diagnosing and treating patients quickly for acute illnesses, something that was apparent throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Narrowing the window between diagnosis and treating makes many treatments more effective, he said.

Amazon is not the first company to explore prescription deliveries by drone. The drugstore chain CVS Health worked with UPS to test deliveries in 2019 in North Carolina but that program has ended, a CVS spokesman said.

Intermountain Health started providing drone deliveries of prescriptions in 2021 in the Salt Lake City area and has been expanding the program, according to Daniel Duersch, supply chain director for the health care system. Intermountain is partnering with the logistics company Zipline to use drones that drop packages by parachute.

Companies seeking to use drones for commercial purposes have faced hurdles from regulators who want to make sure things are operating safely. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had predicted a decade ago that drones would be making deliveries by 2018. Even now, the e-commerce giant is only using the technology in a small number of markets.

Lisa Ellman, the executive director of the Commercial Drone Alliance, an industry group that counts Amazon as one of its members, said to date, regulatory approvals have been limited to specific geographic areas and “in terms of their scope and usefulness to companies.”

That said, she noted regulators have also been issuing more approvals. Last month, the FAA gave the OK for Zipline and UPS to fly longer-range drones.

Walmart has also been working to expand its own drone deliveries.

Also on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a new drone called MK30 that, by the end of next year, will replace the drones it currently uses to delivery packages. The company says the new drone flies further, is smaller and quieter, and also has enhanced delivery capabilities.

Amazon has said its drones will fly as high as 120 meters, or nearly 400 feet, before slowly descending when they reach the customer’s home. The drone will check to make sure the delivery zone is clear of pets, children or any other obstructions before dropping the package on a delivery marker.

Amazon has been growing its presence in health care for a few years now.

Aside from adding a pharmacy, it also spent nearly $4 billion to buy primary care provider One Medical. In August, the company added video telemedicine visits in all 50 states.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is heading into one of its biggest sales events of the year — Prime Day — with a lawsuit hanging over its head that accuses it of preventing sellers from hawking their merchandise at lower prices on other sites.

The Federal Trade Commission’s long-awaited antitrust case is the agency’s most aggressive move yet to tame the market power of Amazon, a company that’s become synonymous with online shopping and fast deliveries.

Under chair Lina Khan, the agency hasn’t been shy about taking big swings against some of America’s biggest companies and testing the limits of competition law to reverse what many of her supporters see as decades of weak antitrust enforcement. But that approach has also led to some high-profile setbacks, most notably in the FTC’s bid to block Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard and Meta’s acquisition of the virtual reality startup Within Unlimited. The FTC is appealing the judge’s ruling in the Microsoft case.

The Amazon case, which was backed by 17 states, marks a full-circle moment for Khan, who is finally confronting the company she scrutinized in an influential scholarly paper she penned as a Yale Law student. In the paper, which was called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” and released in 2017, Khan argued the prevailing way of looking at anticompetitive conduct by the impact it has on prices was insufficient in the modern economy. Instead, she pushed for a more progressive approach that examines how corporate concentration impacts the broader market.

Two years ago, Khan was tapped to lead the FTC by President Joe Biden, whose administration has taken a tougher stance on antitrust enforcement. That same year, Amazon unsuccessfully sought to get her recused from agency probes against the company, arguing she was too biased.

Now, her agency must prove in court both that Amazon is a monopoly and is using its dominance to prevent competition from flourishing in the marketplace.

“If we succeed, competition will be restored and people will benefit from lower prices, greater quality, greater selection as a result,” Khan said during a recent call with reporters.

A final decision in Amazon case will likely come years down the road, assuming the lawsuit isn’t dropped under a new administration, dismissed by a judge or ends in a settlement akin to the one Amazon reached with European regulators last year. A similar lawsuit filed last year by the state of California is set to go to trial in 2026. The District of Columbia also tried to sue Amazon on antitrust grounds before, but its lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge last year.

Experts say the FTC faces a few hurdles in its own case, including convincing the court which slice of the market Amazon is allegedly monopolizing.

In the 172-page complaint filed in federal court, the government paints a picture of an institution that strong-arms sellers and exercises monopoly power in what it calls the “online superstore market” and “online marketplace services.” This isn’t the entire U.S. e-commerce sector, of which Amazon is estimated to control about 40%. But rather, the agency is describing the types of single-destination online stores that offer a large array of products, and allows sellers to access a significant number of shoppers.

In a blog post responding to the lawsuit, Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky accused the FTC of attempting to “gerrymander alleged market” to portray Amazon as something it’s not. He said consumers buy over 80% of all retail products in physical stores and that Amazon was “just a piece of a massive and robust retail market” that offers options to consumers and sellers. Brick-and-mortar retailers, online stores and newer buy-online-pick-up-in-store options, he says, are all competing vigorously with each other.

Online, Amazon has been facing growing competition from traditional retailers including Walmart, and Chinese shopping sites Shein and Temu, which became popular by offering ultra-cheap goods. There are also platforms like Etsy and Shopify that are enabling small businesses to sell directly to consumers, and specialist retailers like Wayfair.

“Whichever way you look, there are companies competing with Amazon,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail.

Besides the jargon around market definitions, the substance of the agency’s complaint focuses on Amazon’s growing fees on third-party sellers and its ramifications on consumers. It accuses the e-commerce company of squeezing sellers through various fees and employing a massive web-crawling apparatus that punishes them for offering lower prices on other sites. The FTC also alleges Amazon keeps sellers dependent on services that have allowed it to collect billions in revenue every year.

Zapolsky counters that Amazon — just like any store owner that doesn’t want to promote bad deals — doesn’t highlight listings that aren’t competitively priced. He also said the services the company provides to sellers are optional.

The Amazon case comes as federal prosecutors and state attorneys general are in the middle of a 10-week trial trying to prove Google rigged the market in its favor by locking in its search engine as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices. That case was brought by the Department of Justice and marks the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since regulators went after Microsoft and its dominance of personal computer software a quarter century ago.

Maurice Stucke, a former senior advisor at agency during Khan’s tenure, said even though there have been some notable antitrust cases, there hasn’t been that much case law around monopolization in the past few decades, limiting the examples the FTC can draw from for its Amazon lawsuit. And even if the FTC wins its lawsuit years down the line, he said changes in the market could make it possible for Amazon to maintain its dominance without engaging in the activities the agency is alleging.

“Once you get to relief, it might be too little too late,” said Stucke, who currently teaches law at the University of Tennessee.

For her part, Khan has dodged questions about whether the agency would try to break up Amazon. She said its focus right now is on establishing liability. The lawsuit, though, does call for “structural relief,” which means the agency could — down the road — ask the court to change the way Amazon works in minor or major ways.

Overall, there has not been a lot of monopolization cases that have ended in a court ordering a company to divest itself, said Sean Sullivan, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who teaches antitrust law.

“Judges are trying really hard to do the right thing,” he said. “But they’re also conscious that if they make a mistake, that type of remedy is potentially very costly and would have massive economic ramifications.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Friday that new commitments by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies that are leading the development of artificial intelligence technology to meet a set of AI safeguards brokered by his White House are an important step toward managing the “enormous” promise and risks posed by the technology.

Biden announced that his administration has secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure that their AI products are safe before they release them. Some of the commitments call for third-party oversight of the workings of the next generation of AI systems, though they don’t detail who will audit the technology or hold the companies accountable.

“We must be clear eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose,” Biden said, adding that the companies have a “fundamental obligation” to ensure their products are safe.

“Social media has shown us the harm that powerful technology can do without the right safeguards in place,” Biden added. “These commitments are a promising step, but we have a lot more work to do together.”

A surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images and other media has brought public fascination as well as concern about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.

The four tech giants, along with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and startups Anthropic and Inflection, have committed to security testing “carried out in part by independent experts” to guard against major risks, such as to biosecurity and cybersecurity, the White House said in a statement.

That testing will also examine the potential for societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and more theoretical dangers about advanced AI systems that could gain control of physical systems or “self-replicate” by making copies of themselves.

The companies have also committed to methods for reporting vulnerabilities to their systems and to using digital watermarking to help distinguish between real and AI-generated images or audio known as deepfakes.

Executives from the seven companies met behind closed doors with Biden and other officials Friday as they pledged to follow the standards.

“He was very firm and clear” that he wanted the companies to continue to be innovative, but at the same time “felt that this needed a lot of attention,” Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview after the White House gathering.

“It’s a big deal to bring all the labs together, all the companies,” said Suleyman, whose Palo Alto, California-based startup is the youngest and smallest of the firms. “This is supercompetitive and we wouldn’t come together under other circumstances.”

The companies will also publicly report flaws and risks in their technology, including effects on fairness and bias, according to the pledge.

The voluntary commitments are meant to be an immediate way of addressing risks ahead of a longer-term push to get Congress to pass laws regulating the technology.

Some advocates for AI regulations said Biden’s move is a start but more needs to be done to hold the companies and their products accountable.

“A closed-door deliberation with corporate actors resulting in voluntary safeguards isn’t enough,” said Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute. “We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation, and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models.”

While voluntary, agreeing to submit to “ red team” tests that poke at their AI systems is not an easy promise, said Suleyman.

“The commitment we’ve made to have red-teamers basically try to break our models, identify weaknesses and then share those methods with the other large language model developers is a pretty significant commitment,” Suleyman said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he will introduce legislation to regulate AI and is working closely with the Biden administration “and our bipartisan colleagues” to build upon the pledges made Friday.

A number of technology executives have called for regulation, and several attended an earlier White House summit in May.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Friday that his company is making some commitments that go beyond the White House pledge, including support for regulation that would create a “licensing regime for highly capable models.”

Some experts and upstart competitors worry that the type of regulation being floated could be a boon for deep-pocketed first-movers led by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as smaller players are elbowed out by the high cost of making their AI systems adhere to regulatory strictures.

The White House pledge notes that it mostly only applies to models that “are overall more powerful than the current industry frontier,” set by recent models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and image generator DALL-E 2 and similar releases from Anthropic, Google and Amazon.

A number of countries have been looking at ways to regulate AI, including European Union lawmakers negotiating sweeping AI rules for the 27-nation bloc that could restrict applications deemed to have the highest risks.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said the United Nations is “the ideal place” to adopt global standards and appointed a board that will report back on options for global AI governance by the end of the year.

Guterres also said he welcomed calls from some countries for the creation of a new U.N. body to support global efforts to govern AI, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The White House said Friday that it has consulted on the voluntary commitments with a number of countries.

The pledge is heavily focused on safety risks but doesn’t address other worries about the latest AI technology, including the effect on jobs and market competition, the environmental resources required to build the models, and copyright concerns about the writings, art and other human handiwork being used to teach AI systems how to produce human-like content.

Last week, OpenAI and The Associated Press announced a deal for the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories. The amount it will pay for that content was not disclosed.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Amazon will pay more than $30 million to settle alleged privacy violations involving its voice assistant Alexa and its doorbell camera Ring.

The Federal Trade Commission voted to file charges in two separate cases Wednesday that could also force the company to delete certain data collected by its popular internet-connected devices.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the Alexa case, the FTC said Amazon had deceived users of the voice assistance service for years. It retained children’s recordings indefinitely unless a parent requested the information be deleted, the agency said, and even when it deleted those recordings, Amazon often kept the transcripts.

The FTC ordered the company to delete inactive child accounts as well as certain voice information and geolocation data.

In imposing a $25 million fine, the agency said Amazon had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and FTC Consumer Protection Chief Samuel Levine accused the tech giant of sacrificing “privacy for profits” in “flouting parents’ deletion requests.”

FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya said Amazon kept kids’ data indefinitely to refine its voice recognition algorithm. In a separate statement, he said the Alexa ruling sends a message to all tech companies who are “sprinting to do the same” amid fierce competition in developing AI datasets.

“Nothing is more visceral to a parent than the sound of their child’s voice,” tweeted Bedoya, the father of two small children.

In the Ring case, the FTC accuses Amazon’s home security camera subsidiary of allowing its employees and contractors to access the private videos of consumers and providing lax security practices that enabled hackers to take control of some accounts.

Amazon bought California-based Ring in 2018, and many of the violations cited by the FTC predate the acquisition. The FTC’s order would require Ring to pay $5.8 million that would be used for consumer refunds.

The proposed orders must be approved by federal judges.

FTC commissioners unanimously voted to file the charges against Amazon in both cases. In addition to the fine in the Alexa case, the proposed order prohibits Amazon from using deleted geolocation and voice information to create or improve any data product. The order also requires Amazon to create a privacy program for its use of geolocation information.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon said Wednesday it has closed its $3.9 billion acquisition of the primary care organization One Medical.

The e-commerce giant has said the buyout, which was announced in July, is a key component of its growing health care business, which includes its online drugstore Amazon Pharmacy and a patient to doctor messaging service called Amazon Clinic.

One Medical, which was owned by San Francisco-based 1Life Healthcare Inc, has about 815,000 members and 214 medical offices in more than 20 markets. Its membership-based service offers virtual care as well as in-person visits.

The two companies said Wednesday that for the first year, membership will be available to new U.S. customers for $144, a 28% discount intended to lure new customers.

Anti-monopoly groups have been calling on the Federal Trade Commission to block Amazon’s purchase of the company, arguing it would endanger patient privacy and give the online retailer more dominance in the marketplace.

Last September, both One Medical and Amazon received a request for additional information from the FTC in connection with a review of the merger. FTC spokesperson Peter Kaplan said the agency won’t bring forth a lawsuit to block the merger. But it’s not ruling out any challenges in the future.

“The FTC’s investigation of Amazon’s acquisition of One Medical continues,” Kaplan said in a statement. “The commission will continue to look at possible harms to competition created by this merger as well as possible harms to consumers that may result from Amazon’s control and use of sensitive consumer health information held by One Medical.”

The One Medical purchase is the first acquisition made under Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021 and sees health care as a growth opportunity for the company.

“Customers want and deserve better, and that’s what One Medical has been working and innovating on for more than a decade. Together, we believe we can make the health care experience easier, faster, more personal, and more convenient for everyone,” Jassy said in a statement.

The FTC is also reviewing Amazon’s $1.65 billion planned purchase of iRobot, which was announced last August.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is axing free grocery delivery for Prime members on orders less than $150.

Customers who get their groceries delivered from Amazon Fresh — and pay less than $150 — will be charged between $3.95 and $9.95, depending on the order size, the company said in an email to Prime members Friday.

The new policy starts February 28.

“We will continue to offer convenient two-hour delivery windows for all orders, and customers in some areas will be able to select a longer, six-hour delivery window for a reduced fee,” Amazon said in the email.

Launched in 2005, Prime has more than 200 million members worldwide who pay $139 a year, or $14.99 a month, for faster shipping and other perks, such as free delivery and returns.

Currently, the company offers members free grocery deliveries on orders above $35, with the exception of New York, where it’s $50.

Under the new policy, the company said delivery charges will be $3.95 for orders between $100-$150, $6.95 for orders of $50 to $100, and $9.95 for orders under $50. Amazon Fresh deliveries over $150 will remain free.

“We’re introducing a service fee on some Amazon Fresh delivery orders to help keep prices low in our online and physical grocery stores as we better cover grocery delivery costs and continue to enable offering a consistent, fast, and high-quality delivery experience,” Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson said in a prepared statement.

The company has dozens of Amazon Fresh stores across the U.S. and has opened some abroad. Amazon has also owned Whole Foods since 2017.

The decision to impose new fees comes as the company attempts to trim costs amid a hazy economic environment. In the past few months, it has axed unprofitable areas of its business and paused hiring among its corporate workforce. It said this month that it will lay off 18,000 workers.

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Amazon is adding a prescription drug discount program to its growing health care business.

The retail giant said Tuesday that it will launch RxPass, a subscription service for customers who have Prime memberships. Amazon said people will pay $5 a month to fill as many prescriptions as they need from a list of about 50 generic medications, which are generally cheaper versions of brand-name drugs.

The company said the flat fee could cover a list of medications like the antibiotic amoxicillin and the anti-inflammatory drug naproxen.

Sildenafil also made the list. It’s used to treat erectile dysfunction under the brand name Viagra and also treats a form of high blood pressure.

Amazon sells a range of generic drugs through its pharmacy service. Some already cost as liitle as $1 for a 30-day supply, so the benefit of this new program will vary by customer.

The program doesn’t use insurance, and people with government-funded Medicaid or Medicare coverage are not eligible. It will be available in 42 states and Washington, D.C. at launch.

Any program that gets low-cost generic drugs to more patients “is a good thing,” said Karen Van Nuys, an economist who studies drug pricing at the University of Southern California. But she added that she wasn’t sure how much of an impact RxPass will have.

She noted that the program is limited to Amazon Prime customers. Other options like the Mark Cuban CostPlus Drug Co. sell more generic drugs, many for under $5.

“I just don’t know that it’s expanding access to a new set of patients,” Van Nuys said.

Still, the move could help the company take up some more space in the health care market, even though it has not always been successful in its aim. Last year, the company shuttered its hybrid virtual, in-home care service called Amazon Care after it failed to get traction from employers. And Haven, a company Amazon created in collaboration with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to improve health costs, dissolved a year earlier than that.

Amazon has said its online drug store Amazon Pharmacy is a key part of its health care plan, along with primary care organization One Medical, which the online giant is seeking to acquire for $3.9 billion. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the proposed buyout.

In November, the company also said it would begin offering “Amazon Clinic,” a messaging service that connects patients with doctors for about two dozen common conditions, such as allergies and hair loss.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon said Wednesday it had its biggest ever Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend, aided by a record number of consumers looking for deals online amid high inflation.

The e-commerce company does not typically share how much it earns during its sales events and did not disclose its overall revenue from the weekend. It said in a news release independent businesses that sell on its site generated more than $1 billion in sales.

A record 196.7 million people shopped in stores and online during the five-day shopping period that stretched from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, 17 million more compared to last year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group. It said consumers also spent an average of $325 during the weekend on holiday-related purchases, up from $301 last year.

Though higher prices on products might contribute to some of the boost, NRF and other retail tracking groups have said higher demand is also driving the growth. Adobe Analytics, which tracks transactions at over 85 of the top 100 U.S. online stores, said consumers spent $35.27 billion during the holiday weekend, up 4% compared to last year.

Higher demand could signal that budget-conscious shoppers are hungry for deals. As spending has gone up, more consumers have also been dipping into their savings, purchasing items on credit cards and using “buy now, pay later” services that lack interest charges but carry late fees.

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