The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division announced Wednesday that OpenAI and its former subsidiary Statsig have signed a settlement placing the two companies under three years of federal oversight of their hiring practices, amid allegations that both firms violated immigration law by discouraging U.S. citizens from applying for jobs tied to green-card sponsorships.
As TechCrunch reported, the companies agreed to pay a combined $3.2 million — $1.2 million as a direct fine and the remaining $2 million set aside as potential restitution for U.S. citizens who applied to the affected roles and were found to have been harmed.
Neither OpenAI nor Statsig admitted to wrongdoing as part of the agreement.
The DOJ alleged the companies broke provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a law originally passed in 1952, by failing to conduct genuine recruitment of qualified U.S. workers before pursuing permanent resident applications — a process known as PERM — as the statute requires. Officials said the companies did not list the relevant roles on public job boards, ran radio advertisements late at night, and required paper applications rather than electronic submissions.
While fewer than 10 roles were at issue across both companies, the DOJ said the settlement requires them to draft and obtain departmental approval for their PERM-role hiring policies and to submit semiannual compliance reports. Those reports must document the number of foreign-worker applications pursued, the number of U.S. citizens interviewed for those positions, and other hiring statistics.
OpenAI acquired Statsig, an AI A/B testing company, in September 2025 and later divested at least part of the business in May 2026. The DOJ said it had begun investigating both companies separately in August 2025 — before the acquisition closed — covering five cases at OpenAI spanning 2023 through 2025, and one at Statsig.
The settlement is part of what the department described as an intensified enforcement effort targeting companies over green-card hiring compliance. The INA's PERM provisions, however, have been applied by prior administrations as well. Under the Biden administration, both Facebook and Apple signed similar settlements, though in those cases the DOJ alleged violations were widespread and systematic rather than limited in scope.
The three-year oversight period signals that enforcement attention on the AI industry's hiring pipeline — long reliant on skilled immigrant workers — is unlikely to ease in the near term, even as companies face growing demand for specialized talent and continued pressure to expand their workforces rapidly.
Disclaimer