About
What this covers
F-1 student status, CPT, OPT and STEM OPT, OPT unemployment, cap-gap, H-1B registration, the lottery, cap, petitions and fees, change of status from F-1 to H-1B, and travel and grace periods for these statuses.
It doesn't cover green cards, citizenship, asylum or other visa categories, and it doesn't advise on your own case.
How answers are sourced
- Answers are written by an AI model, Claude, using only official sources: the Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal Register, USCIS and Study in the States pages, and court orders.
- Each fact cites its source. Regulations are labeled binding, agency pages official guidance, and proposed rules not law.
- Rules that are new or being challenged are tracked by hand on Rules we track, and each answer shows their status and when it was last verified.
- Answers are checked automatically for citations and for matching the rule status. If an answer fails, you get the sources instead of the text.
- AI can still make mistakes. Follow the citations, and confirm anything important with your DSO or an immigration attorney.
Privacy
Last checked: 2026-11-08.
This assistant explains US immigration rules. It doesn't need to know who you are, and it tries to keep as little as possible.
What we keep
- No accounts. You don't sign in, and we don't ask for your name.
- Your question, with identifiers removed. Before a question is answered or saved, we automatically mask USCIS receipt numbers, SEVIS IDs, A-numbers, Social Security numbers, email addresses and phone numbers, and tell you when we did. Please don't include other personal details either.
- The answer and how it was made: which sources and rule statuses were used, whether the answer passed its checks, and the time and cost of producing it. We use these records to measure and improve answer quality.
- Your feedback, if you give it: which button you pressed and any comment, with identifiers removed the same way.
- Kept for 90 days, then deleted.
- Not your IP address. To limit each visitor to 20 questions an hour, we keep a one-way hash of your IP address in memory only; it isn't written to disk and is gone when the server restarts. Our app doesn't log IP addresses; our hosting provider's network may see them to deliver the page.
- Not your calculator dates. The unemployment calculator does its count and keeps nothing.
- No cookies, trackers or analytics, and every page and script is served from this site.
Who else sees your question
- Anthropic (Claude API) writes the answers. Your question, with identifiers already masked, is sent to
Anthropic's API along with the official sources used to answer it. Anthropic's published terms for API
customers say:
- API inputs and outputs are not used to train its models by default: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products" (Is my data used for model training?), and "Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services" (Commercial Terms).
- Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days, except where it must keep them longer to enforce its Usage Policy or to comply with the law (How long do you store my organization's data?). Content flagged for a Usage Policy violation can be kept for up to 2 years.
- This project has no zero data retention agreement with Anthropic.
- Our hosting and database providers run the server and store the records above on our behalf.
- Nobody else. Searching the sources happens on our own server; the search model runs locally and your question isn't sent to any other service.
Not legal advice
Information only, not legal advice. Rules change; check the status date on each answer and confirm with your school's DSO or an immigration attorney.