OpenAI has agreed to pay $3.2m to settle a US government claim. The allegation: it favoured workers on temporary visas over American workers. The Justice Department announced the deal on Tuesday. It resolves claims that the company broke federal anti-discrimination law when recruiting for a set of roles.

The department’s Civil Rights Division said OpenAI OpCo LLC and its subsidiary Statsig had violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. The alleged discrimination happened during the Permanent Labor Certification process, known as PERM. That is the step where an employer sponsors a worker for a green card. First, it must show it could not find a qualified American for the job.

The Justice Department laid out what it said it found. OpenAI did not post the PERM roles on its external careers site, it said. It advertised other jobs there as normal. It required paper applications by mail for those roles, while accepting electronic ones elsewhere. And it advertised some positions on late-night radio. Fewer than ten jobs were at issue.

What OpenAI agreed to

Of the $3.2m, OpenAI will pay $1.2m in civil penalties. It will put another $2m into a fund to compensate the affected workers. The company also agreed to change how it recruits. It will post PERM roles on its public careers site and accept electronic applications. It will also retrain staff, revise its policies, and submit to Justice Department monitoring.

Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, said preferring visa holders over US workers for jobs is illegal. The settlement, she added, makes OpenAI “redress harm and change its recruitment practices.” It gives American workers a fair shot at the roles. A spokesperson for OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

The PERM programme lets employers sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency when they cannot find a qualified American. During that process, it bars them from discriminating on the basis of citizenship. The Justice Department said this was its thirteenth such settlement since it relaunched its Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative in 2025.

The settlement adds to a busy legal stretch for OpenAI. The company is separately fighting a trade-secrets suit from Apple. The Justice Department has pressed similar cases against other large companies too. And employers across the industry are weighing how they hire for sought-after technology jobs. OpenAI’s own presence in Washington has grown alongside its business.

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