Judge Leo Sorokin kills Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee as OpenAI and Nvidia filings surge

When a federal judge struck down Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee, it did not land in a vacuum. It landed after frontier AI companies boosted foreign-worker filings anyway, betting that talent mobility at any cost would beat the bill. Monday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston didn’t just change paperwork. It reframed the fee as an “unlawful tax” that Congress never authorized, and it deepened an already messy legal fight.

And the numbers show why employers cared enough to scramble. According to a Fortune analysis, Nvidia’s certified H-1B applications rose 19% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2025. OpenAI’s applications more than tripled. Anthropic went from roughly 10 to nearly 60. Meanwhile, the pullback was just as stark: Amazon, the country’s single largest H-1B sponsor, along with Google and Microsoft posted steep declines, with smaller dips at Meta and Apple.

To understand why this split happened, you have to follow the incentives, not the slogans. The fee imposed a huge one-time cost for new H-1B petitions filed after Sept. 21. For many employers, that means every new foreign hire on an H-1B can suddenly carry an extra $100,000 price tag. But the impact depends on how many new H-1Bs a company files and what those hires represent.

For a company like Amazon, which sponsors H-1B workers by the thousands across engineering and corporate roles, a $100,000 surcharge on every new hire can become budget-breaking in a hurry. For an AI lab racing to hire a few hundred elite researchers while sitting on billions in fresh capital, the same fee can look more like a rounding error relative to what it costs to win a hiring war. Nvidia’s roughly 765 certified applications, which include new, promoted, and transferring employees, may look “trivial” against tens of billions in R&D. Still, the premium can matter a lot when a single researcher can move the needle.

There’s another nuance in how the fee actually bites. It applies once, to new petitions filed after Sept. 21, and largely to applicants coming from overseas, not renewals, extensions, or most workers already in the U.S. That narrower scope matters because employers have options. The source notes that companies have been looking for other ways to bring in foreign-born talent while skirting the fee, including submitting applications for other visas or hiring existing H-1B holders, a practice reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, employers were not just reacting to the fee. They were redesigning their talent supply chain. And that helps explain why frontier AI, which often needs to move fast on specific research roles, leaned into the policy shift earlier, while Big Tech, with large existing pipelines, tried to reduce the marginal cost of onboarding new foreign talent.

Not everyone could play the game. The fee was proven prohibitive for other businesses as well. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it received 211,600 properly submitted applications for the 2027 H-1B allocation, down from 343,981 the year before, Business Insider reported. The decline suggests a blow to smaller businesses that can’t afford the fee, and that matters because the H-1B program has historically functioned as a bridge for a broader set of employers, not just the biggest tech players.

There’s also a deeper question underneath the politics: does H-1B actually help job creation and economic outcomes? A Richmond Federal Reserve study found that winning the H-1B lottery increased employment and revenues between 2020 and 2023, and that companies that won were more likely to survive in the years that followed. That kind of evidence is exactly what gets dragged into legal fights when immigration policy starts getting described in terms of taxes, delegation, and statutory authority.

Now zoom back to Monday’s court decision. Sorokin’s summary judgment directly contradicts a separate case in Washington, D.C., where a federal court upheld the fee in a challenge brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a decision now on appeal. A third suit filed by religious and labor groups in San Francisco is still pending. So instead of settling the question, the ruling increases the odds of higher-court review, potentially even the Supreme Court.

And even while the legal dust is settling, employers are still left with practical uncertainty. The administration is expected to appeal, and employers are guessing whether the $100,000 charge applies to petitions filed today. The fee is set to expire on its own in September 2026. For boards and finance teams, that creates a timing problem: should you front-load hiring decisions, redesign your visa strategy, or wait for a ruling that might or might not change the cost calculus?

This is the part that executives will feel in their day-to-day. If you’re Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any company competing for scarce technical talent, the story is not just “a fee got struck down.” It’s that the market already moved during the uncertainty. Hiring volume, filing strategies, and budgeting assumptions shifted in real time. If you’re Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or another large sponsor, the story is a cautionary tale about how a single policy change can force a portfolio-wide rethink. And if you’re in the middle, with fewer resources to absorb variability, it’s a reminder that immigration policy can act like a hidden tax on growth.

The big takeaway: the policy did not just split companies into winners and losers. It changed behavior before it was settled in court. Now that Sorokin has called the fee an unauthorized tax, the legal fight continues, and the competitive advantage created by earlier filing decisions may not unwind cleanly just because the fee gets labeled unlawful.