OpenAI pays $3.2m and accepts three years of DOJ hiring oversight

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said on Wednesday that OpenAI and Statsig, once its subsidiary, had signed a settlement over their green-card sponsorship practices.

The companies will pay $3.2 million and accept three years of federal oversight of how they hire for those roles. They did not admit wrongdoing.

Of the money, $1.2 million is a fine. The remaining $2 million is set aside as restitution for US citizens who applied for the jobs, if the DOJ finds any who were harmed.

The allegation concerns the PERM process. Before sponsoring a visa-holding employee for permanent residence, an employer must test the labour market for qualified US workers, as the Immigration and Nationality Act has required since 1952.

The DOJ said the companies did not run that test properly. It said roles were kept off public job boards, advertised on the radio late at night, and made to accept paper applications rather than electronic ones.

Fewer than 10 roles were involved. Five cases were at OpenAI between 2023 and 2025, and one was at Statsig.

The timeline matters for anyone doing acquisitions. The DOJ says it opened investigations into both companies separately in August 2025, before OpenAI acquired Statsig in September 2025. OpenAI divested at least part of that business in May 2026.

The oversight is the part with teeth. The companies must draft PERM hiring policies and get them approved by the department, then file reports twice a year.

Those reports must state how many sponsorship applications the companies pursued for foreign employees, how many US citizens they interviewed, and other figures.

In practice that means a paper trail no employer keeps by accident. Job postings, where they ran, how applications were accepted, who was interviewed and why they were rejected.

The DOJ frames the settlement as part of a wider crackdown. The law is not new to enforcement, though: Facebook and Apple signed comparable settlements under the Biden administration, in cases the department described as widespread and systematic.

This one was not described that way. Six cases across two companies produced a $1.2 million fine and three years of federal supervision.

For a founder sponsoring even one engineer, that is the useful number. The exposure does not scale with headcount, and the recruitment records for a single PERM role are the evidence you would be judged on.

The cheap fix is procedural: list the role publicly, accept applications the way everyone else does, and keep the rejection reasons written down at the time rather than reconstructed later.