OpenAI and its former subsidiary, Statsig, have reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) following allegations related to their employment-based green card recruitment practices. Under the agreement, announced Wednesday, the companies will be subject to three years of federal oversight of their hiring processes for certain immigration-related positions.
The DOJ has alleged that these companies used various tactics to prevent U.S. citizens from applying for jobs held by immigrant employees when the companies were sponsoring those workers for permanent U.S. residence. The companies did not admit to wrongdoing, although they did agree to pay $3.2 million. Of that, $1.2 million is a fine and the remaining $2 million is being set aside to pay restitution to U.S. citizens who applied to those jobs, should the DOJ find any who were harmed.
The DOJ alleged that OpenAI and Statsig broke provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by not truly looking for qualified U.S. citizens for these jobs before pursuing permanent residence applications (PERM) as the INA requires. The DOJ said they didn’t list roles on public job boards, advertised on the radio late at night, and required paper applications rather than electronic ones.
“It is illegal to discriminate against U.S. workers by preferring temporary visa holders for jobs,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a Tuesday news release.
While there were fewer than 10 roles at issue, the DOJ said that as part of the settlement, the companies must pay the fine and submit to oversight by the department over their PERM roles. Oversight includes items such as drafting and obtaining approval for their PERM-role hiring policies and submitting semiannual reports. Those reports must include how many applications for foreign employees they pursued, how many U.S. citizens they interviewed, and other statistics.
OpenAI acquired AI A/B testing company Statsig in September 2025 and later divested at least part of the business in May 2026. The DOJ, however, says it began investigating both companies separately before the acquisition, in August 2025, including five cases at OpenAI between 2023 and 2025, and one at Statsig.
The DOJ says that this settlement is part of its increased crackdown on companies over the matter. However, the INA, a law passed in 1952, has been enforced by other administrations against other Big Tech companies. During Biden’s administration, for instance, both Facebook and Apple signed similar settlements, though in both of those cases the DOJ alleged that the violations were widespread and systematic.
Fewer than 10 positions were at issue, but the “resolution amount reflects the harm to U.S. workers when they are shut out of applying for lucrative technology jobs,” according to the DOJ.
Tuesday’s agreement marks the Justice Department’s 13th settlement since relaunching its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative in 2025 to strengthen enforcement of the Immigration and Nationality Act’s ban on citizenship status discrimination
About the Author
Becky Anthony is a tech writer and researcher at techregard. Based in Nigeria, she has a background in English from Bayero University and a strong interest in how technology drives growth and access. She enjoys telling stories about technology, startups and innovation in ways that are clear, human and useful for readers across Africa and globally.
