OpenAI pays $3.2M after DOJ finds it favored visa workers over Americans
A federal probe found OpenAI and its Statsig unit made it needlessly hard for U.S. applicants to land jobs that were being used to sponsor visa holders.
What happened: OpenAI and its subsidiary Statsig Inc. agreed to pay $3.2 million to settle U.S. Department of Justice claims that they discriminated against American job applicants. Investigators found that for a handful of positions being filled through the visa-sponsorship process, the companies skipped their usual step of posting jobs publicly, made U.S. candidates apply by mail instead of online, and even advertised openings on late-night radio — discouraging Americans from applying. OpenAI denies wrongdoing but accepted the settlement.
Why it matters: The case involves fewer than ten jobs, but DOJ says it shows how easily companies can quietly steer roles toward visa holders while technically following the rules. For ordinary job seekers, it's a reminder that some of the most sought-after tech jobs may never show up on the career pages they check, and that enforcement exists to catch that kind of gatekeeping.
How it works, plainly: Before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card, employers must go through PERM: they're supposed to genuinely try to find a qualified U.S. worker first, including advertising the job the same way they normally would. DOJ says OpenAI didn't advertise these roles on its own website like usual, required paper applications only, and used obscure ad placements — steps the DOJ says engineered the recruitment to look compliant while discouraging real U.S. applicants.
The rollout: OpenAI must now post PERM-related jobs on its public careers site, accept online applications, retrain staff on anti-discrimination law, and submit to DOJ monitoring. This is the 13th settlement since the department relaunched its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative in 2025, part of a broader push — alongside proposed higher H-1B wage requirements — to make it costlier and harder to bypass American applicants, even as a separate $100,000 H-1B fee was struck down in court in June.