OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its former subsidiary Statsig have agreed to pay $3.2 million to settle allegations by the US Department of Justice that they discriminated against American citizens while recruiting for a small number of jobs linked to green-card sponsorship, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the settlement.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said the companies broke provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act by failing to genuinely test the domestic labour market before pursuing permanent residence applications for visa-holding staff, a legal process known as PERM, or Permanent Labor Certification.
What the DOJ found
PERM requires US employers to advertise a role and show that no qualified American candidate is available before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card. Federal investigators allege that OpenAI kept the disputed postings off its public careers website, even though that was standard practice for all its other openings.
Applicants for the PERM roles reportedly had to submit paper applications by mail, at a time when the company accepted electronic applications for every other position. Investigators also pointed to radio adverts run late at night, which they said were structured in a way that discouraged US workers from responding.
Fewer than 10 positions were at issue, spanning five cases at OpenAI between 2023 and 2025 and one at Statsig, the analytics and A/B-testing company OpenAI acquired in September 2025 and later partly divested in May 2026. The DOJ says its investigations into both firms began separately, before that acquisition took place.
“"It is illegal to discriminate against US workers by preferring temporary visa holders for jobs," said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.”
Payment, oversight and OpenAI's response
Of the $3.2 million settlement, $1.2 million is a civil penalty paid to the government, while the remaining $2 million will be set aside as a back-pay fund for any US citizens the DOJ later determines were harmed by the recruitment practices. OpenAI will also need to revise its employment policies, train staff on immigration anti-discrimination rules, post PERM vacancies publicly and accept electronic applications for those roles going forward.
The settlement includes three years of departmental oversight, during which OpenAI must draft PERM hiring policies for DOJ approval and file semiannual reports detailing how many foreign workers it sponsored, how many US citizens it interviewed for those roles, and related statistics.
OpenAI has not admitted wrongdoing. A company spokesperson, quoted by Newsweek, said attracting talent from both the United States and abroad is essential to the firm's mission, adding: "While we disagree with the DOJ's findings, we reached this agreement to resolve the matter and move forward with our PERM program, which is critical for employees."
Part of a wider push
The DOJ has described the case as part of a broader enforcement drive against companies it believes favour temporary visa holders over American applicants. According to IBTimes UK, the department has now reached 13 similar settlements since revamping the initiative last year, though OpenAI is by far the most prominent technology company to be caught up in it.
The action lands amid an intensifying transatlantic and domestic debate over skilled-worker visas in the AI industry. Supporters of programmes such as H-1B and PERM argue that access to global talent underpins American, and by extension Western, leadership in artificial intelligence, while critics say some firms exploit sponsorship rules to sideline domestic workers. For European observers watching Silicon Valley's dominance in AI, the case is a reminder that US immigration enforcement, not just export controls or antitrust action, is increasingly shaping how the sector's biggest players operate.
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