The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced on Wednesday that OpenAI, and its once-subsidiary Statsig, signed a settlement that includes three years of oversight over the AI lab’s hiring practices.
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.
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 semi-annual 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.
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