Federal regulators have secured a multi-year monitoring agreement over how OpenAI handles permanent residency sponsorships for its foreign employees, marking one of the more prominent enforcement actions taken against a leading AI company on immigration-related hiring grounds.

The Justice Department's civil rights unit found that OpenAI, along with the analytics firm Statsig, which OpenAI briefly owned, failed to properly test the domestic labor market before pursuing green cards for employees already on work visas. Under the decades-old federal immigration statute governing this process, employers must first make a genuine effort to recruit qualified citizens for a role before sponsoring a foreign worker for permanent residency.

Investigators concluded that the recruitment steps taken fell short of that standard. Roles tied to the sponsorship applications reportedly weren't posted on standard public job boards, were advertised through late-night radio spots unlikely to reach many job seekers, and required candidates to submit paper applications instead of the digital process typically used elsewhere in the hiring pipeline.

Neither company admitted to any wrongdoing as part of the deal. Still, both agreed to pay the combined penalty and restitution fund, with the latter reserved for any U.S. citizen applicants the department later determines were passed over unfairly for one of the affected positions.

Beyond the payment, the agreement requires the companies to submit their hiring policies for these sponsorship-track roles to federal reviewers for approval and to file detailed reports twice a year. Those filings must disclose how many foreign-worker sponsorship applications were pursued, how many citizen applicants were actually interviewed, and related hiring data, giving regulators an ongoing window into the process going forward.

Officials describe this case as part of a wider push to enforce recruitment rules tied to green card sponsorships across the tech sector. That said, the underlying law dates back more than seven decades and has been applied against other major employers under previous administrations as well, including earlier settlements involving other large technology and social media companies, though those cases were described as involving more widespread violations than the handful of roles at issue here.

The analytics company named alongside OpenAI in the settlement was acquired by the AI lab in 2025 and later partially divested. Regulators noted their investigation into both firms began independently before that acquisition took place, underscoring that the scrutiny predates their brief corporate relationship.