Bellevue-based Statsig Inc. and its parent company OpenAI will pay $3.2 million to settle federal allegations that they shut U.S. workers out of job openings reserved for temporary visa holders.

The U.S. Justice Department announced the settlement Tuesday, Aug. 4, saying both companies violated the Immigration and Nationality Act by requiring U.S. applicants to mail paper applications for certain positions while accepting electronic submissions from everyone else.

OpenAI also failed to post those roles on its public careers site and ran late-night radio ads for them, tactics the DOJ called deliberate barriers to discourage American applicants.

The $3.2 million breaks down into a $1.2 million civil penalty paid to the U.S. Treasury and a $2 million back-pay fund for workers the government says were harmed. Fewer than 10 positions were at issue across both companies, but the DOJ said the amount "reflects the harm to U.S. workers when they are shut out of applying for lucrative technology jobs."

Statsig, a product-experimentation platform with about 110 employees at its Bellevue office, was acquired by OpenAI in September 2025 for $1.1 billion in stock. Founder Vijaye Raji, a former Meta and Microsoft executive who came to the U.S. on an H-1B visa, joined OpenAI as CTO of Applications after the deal closed.

The DOJ's investigation found OpenAI engaged in discriminatory hiring from at least June 2023 through April 2025 across five job postings tied to the Permanent Labor Certification process, known as PERM. Statsig's violation involved one PERM-related recruitment in July 2025, according to the settlement document. The investigation of OpenAI began Aug. 13, 2025, about three weeks before the Statsig acquisition was announced.

OpenAI disputed the findings but chose to settle. The company said in a statement reported by Business Insider that it "disagrees with the DOJ's findings" but reached the agreement "to resolve the matter and move forward with our PERM program, which is critical for employees and candidates requiring immigration support."

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, said the settlement "ensures that OpenAI redresses harm and changes its recruitment practices so that U.S. workers receive a fair opportunity for highly sought-after technology positions."

Under the three-year agreement, OpenAI must accept electronic applications for all PERM-related roles through the same portal used for other jobs, post those positions with searchable identifiers on its careers site, conduct good-faith reviews of U.S. applicants and file semi-annual compliance reports. The $1.2 million penalty is due within 60 days.

The case is the 13th settlement under the DOJ's Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, which was created during Trump's first term in 2017, deprioritized under Biden and relaunched in 2025.

It is the largest since the relaunch. In earlier years, Apple and Meta settled similar PERM-related cases for $25 million and $14.25 million, respectively.