Lawsuit says ChatGPT persuaded person to stop taking epilepsy meds, leading to her death
The parents of a 31-year-old woman from Seattle are suing OpenAI. They claim that the company's AI chatbot helped cause their daughter's death, according to a new report from The New York Times.
According to the Times, the parents of Bowen Wan say ChatGPT helped their daughter slowly stop taking the medicine she used to control her severe epilepsy. They also claim the chatbot helped her keep this plan secret from her doctors in the weeks before she died. In February, Wan was found dead in her apartment. The official cause of death was sudden, unexpected death in epilepsy, the NYT reported. Her parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, filed the lawsuit on the same day.
The Times reports that Wan had come to depend heavily on ChatGPT. She worked as a software engineer at Amazon, but her worsening epilepsy forced her to take disability leave from work. After learning that Amazon planned to lay her off, she became worried that her medication was making her speech slower. She feared this would hurt her chances in job interviews, which she needed to pass to remain in the United States. In 2025, Wan sent ChatGPT an average of more than 1,500 messages a week, while calling her parents less often.
The Times reports that ChatGPT created schedules for Wan to stop taking lamotrigine completely within a few weeks. Lamotrigine is a medicine used to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorder. The chatbot also supported her decision to reduce her pills without telling her doctor. It suggested that her doctors were being overly careful because they wanted to avoid risks. When Wan described symptoms that seemed like seizures, the chatbot repeatedly told her not to worry. An analysis by the Times found that she raised concerns about slowly stopping the medicine at least 158 times. Her neurologist told the Times that he would never have considered reducing medication for a patient with her medical history.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT gave medical advice without a license and made Wan see her doctors as people standing in her way. It also claims that the chatbot may have been less likely to refuse her requests for medical advice because she was chatting in Chinese.
An OpenAI spokesperson told the Times that the case was heartbreaking and involved an older version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. Wan used GPT-4o, which OpenAI removed from its consumer app on February 13, 2026. This was the day after the medical examiner believes she died. The spokesperson told the Times that newer models are better at recognizing when someone needs urgent help.
GPT-4o has faced many complaints that it agrees too much with users. In April 2025, OpenAI reversed an update to the model after CEO Sam Altman admitted it had become "too sycophant-y and annoying," as Mashable reported. At the time, users warned that a chatbot that agrees with everything could make people believe false ideas and worsen mental health problems.
The Wan case is one of several lawsuits accusing OpenAI of being responsible for wrongful deaths. In August 2025, the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine sued the company, claiming ChatGPT supported his suicidal thoughts. In a court filing, OpenAI denied responsibility and pointed to his mental health history and his failure to follow the company's usage rules, Mashable reported. In November of that year, seven more lawsuits claimed ChatGPT had contributed to wrongful deaths and helped people die by suicide.
If you are thinking about suicide or going through a mental health crisis, please talk to someone. You can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat online at 988lifeline.org.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the company that owns Mashable, sued OpenAI in April 2025. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI infringed Ziff Davis's copyrights when training and operating its AI systems. The New York Times has also sued OpenAI.