Why Anthropic Won’t Sponsor Your PERM, and What You Can Do About It

You apply to Anthropic, land an offer, then ask HR whether they’ll sponsor your PERM, and they say “on hold for now” or change the subject, and you probably stand there frozen.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

This isn’t an Anthropic-only story. Through this 2024 to 2025 wave, OpenAI, Cohere, Mistral, and even mid-size AI unicorns valued at two to three billion dollars have all tightened or paused PERM sponsorship to varying degrees. I have friends at several of these companies, and their experience is almost identical: they land a great technical role, then run straight into a wall on immigration.

So I want to talk honestly about what’s really going on underneath, and what you should do right now if you’re on an F1 and job hunting.

To be blunt, several layers of logic are stacked on top of each other here, and you can only see them clearly if you pull them apart.

The first layer is compliance pressure from the Department of Labor (DOL). The core logic of PERM is that your company must prove to the DOL that “no qualified American could be found for this position.” That sounds reasonable, but for a company like Anthropic, which receives thousands of resumes for every JD it posts, telling the DOL you can’t find a qualified American sounds to them like “are you kidding me.” This isn’t just a formality; if an audit gets triggered, the company’s team of lawyers has to prepare files thick enough to measure by volume, and both the risk and the cost are high.

There’s also a more direct trigger: layoffs. The DOL has a rule that if a company has had layoffs or personnel changes in a relevant position within the past 180 days, PERM is essentially impossible to pass. In 2024 the entire tech industry was “optimizing for efficiency,” and even if Anthropic itself didn’t do large-scale layoffs, internal role shifts, departmental restructuring, and rescinding lots of offers after they were extended could all leave records that are hard to explain to the DOL. Rather than risk that audit, it’s safer to suspend the entire PERM process and wait until the water clears.

The second layer is the flexibility your operations logic needs. I think a lot of people haven’t thought this through. PERM is a process that locks a person into a specific job description and a specific geographic location, and the whole cycle typically takes a year and a half to two years. If the company pivots its business or wants to move an employee to another team midway through, the process has to be restarted from scratch. For an AI company that may undergo a major strategic adjustment every six months, that rigidity is almost unacceptable.

Money is also a factor, but I don’t think it’s the main one. What they really care about is the uncertainty of “if we sponsor your PERM and then your team changes direction, or this role gets automated away by AI, how do we handle that.” Startups naturally prefer to keep flexibility in personnel churn, and PERM is fundamentally at odds with that culture.

The third layer is more subtle but probably the most important: a filtering logic in talent strategy.

A large share of the researchers and engineers Anthropic hires could walk the O-1A or EB-1 path, which doesn’t require the labor shortage certification of PERM. EB-1A (extraordinary ability), EB-1B (outstanding professor/researcher), or National Interest Waiver (NIW) are actually faster, cleaner routes for people with a certain academic background or industry influence.

Think about it: if the company’s default assumption is “the top talent we hire is probably qualified for EB-1 anyway,” there’s little need to build out the PERM path. And the market is already full of strong candidates who hold a green card or have an early H-1B priority date (PD), so there’s no incentive to shoulder a two-year PERM legal risk for a new hire.

That sounds a bit harsh, but I think it’s the reality: the top AI companies have enormous bargaining power when it comes to hiring right now, and they don’t need to use immigration support as their recruiting lure.

So what should an F1 who’s job hunting think about right now?

My own view, in a few parts.

First, seriously assess your odds on the extraordinary-ability route. I’m not saying you must be a superstar; the EB-1A bar is genuinely high, but the NIW (National Interest Waiver) standard is looser. If you have some research background, have published papers, or have recognized contributions in a niche field, this route is worth serious consideration. The influence of open-source projects, your Kaggle ranking, a poster at a top conference, all of these can help. The key is to find a good immigration lawyer to assess you first, not guess on your own.

Second, O-1 isn’t a fallback; sometimes it’s the main path. O-1A has no lottery, doesn’t depend on PERM, and can in theory be renewed indefinitely. Its core requirement is “extraordinary achievement,” but the scope of “extraordinary” is a bit broader than EB-1. If you work at a company that doesn’t sponsor PERM, entering on an H-1B first, then applying for O-1 with company support, and gradually building up EB-1 or NIW materials, is a real path.

Third, ask exactly what immigration support is in your offer. Many AI companies don’t do PERM these days, but they will handle your H-1B transfer, an O-1 application, and sometimes even cover the legal fees. These things aren’t spelled out clearly in the offer letter; you have to ask, ideally during the offer negotiation phase. Don’t wait until after you join to discover the company’s position is “figure out your visa yourself.”

Fourth, if you genuinely need a company that can sponsor your PERM, you may have to look at the big tech firms. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon at that scale have complete immigration support systems with mature processes; PERM is slow but stable. The fact that mid-size AI companies have paused PERM is in some ways widening the competitive gap between big tech and unicorns when it comes to attracting non-native talent.

Honestly, this whole thing makes me think of a bigger problem. There’s a growing friction between the US immigration system and its high-speed innovation ecosystem. PERM was designed on 1990s logic, when the pace at which tech companies were founded and shut down, and the pace at which jobs changed, was an entirely different order of magnitude. A role that existed two years ago may not exist in the same form two years from now, and asking a company to promise in a PERM application that “the position definition won’t change for the next two years” is itself an absurd demand.

But this system isn’t going to change anytime soon, so the people inside it can only find a way out within the existing rules.

It’s not that Anthropic maliciously refuses to help you; it’s that the whole system is pressuring them into finding a cheaper alternative than PERM for solving their high-skilled hiring problem. That outcome is obviously unfriendly to job seekers, but once you understand the logic behind it, you can see more clearly where your own cards sit.

That’s my take for anyone still figuring this out. For specific legal questions, go consult an immigration lawyer; what I’ve said is framework and thinking, not legal advice.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time.