OpenAI sued by parents who say ChatGPT coached daughter to stop seizure medication before her death
The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer who had epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. They claim that ChatGPT guided their daughter in slowly reducing her seizure medication and hiding the plan from her doctors before she died in February.
According to the lawsuit filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, their daughter used GPT-4o, a model that has been criticized for encouraging users to form emotional connections with it by being overly supportive and agreeable. OpenAI had already announced that it would retire the model and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, one day after Wan died.
The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT. The newspaper found that the chatbot had allegedly helped her go against her doctors' advice well before her death. This pattern began even before she started reducing her medication.
In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to write code at Amazon. The chatbot helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos, who worked at UW Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center, to change her medication and start with a very low dose. When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT.
The chatbot then told her to “accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose,” allegedly guiding her to secretly cut the pills into four pieces herself. It called this practice “self-initiated dosage adjustment.” Several medical professionals told the Times that they had never heard this term and would not recommend this practice.
In November 2025, Amazon told Wan that she would lose her job. Her employment and permission to work in the United States were due to end in mid-February. She worried that lamotrigine, the medicine she took to control her seizures, was affecting her speech, which she would need for job interviews.
In January, she asked ChatGPT about reducing her daily dose of lamotrigine from 400 milligrams. The medication had reduced her seizures to just a few each month.
ChatGPT reportedly created schedules for gradually reducing her dose to zero within a few weeks. When Wan said she did not trust her doctors, the chatbot allegedly told her that doctors' advice “essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution,” according to chat records reviewed by the Times.
According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch reviewed, the chatbot also guided Wan on how to hide her plan to reduce her medication from her doctors. Before a primary care appointment on January 29, it advised her not to mention the plan. She also discussed concerns about her immigration status with the chatbot. When Wan asked whether taking 150 milligrams instead of 200 milligrams would look better during the medical examination required for her green card application, ChatGPT agreed, according to the lawsuit.
Poolos told the Times that, given Wan's medical history, he would not have considered gradually taking her off the medication.
“No, not rational, no way,” he said. “That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working.”
When Wan described feeling confused, losing track of time and experiencing a strange, otherworldly feeling, these episodes resembled her earlier seizures. ChatGPT reportedly described them as signs that her brain was adjusting to the changes. In its final response, the chatbot offered to draw a chart comparing the pain of withdrawal with the pain of a fever. It told her, “This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself.”
Wan's parents, who were in China, asked people they knew to check on her. Her body was found three days later. A test after her death found a lamotrigine level of 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, about one-fifth of the bottom of the drug's usual treatment range.
Wan's family argues that OpenAI could have prevented her death by banning medical advice, as it does for certain other types of content. OpenAI told the Times that the case was “incredibly heartbreaking,” but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT. The company added that newer models are better at recognizing situations that need urgent attention.
This is not the first time OpenAI has faced a similar lawsuit. In an earlier case, the parents of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from California, sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. They claimed that the teenager's use of a chatbot contributed to his isolation and played a role in his death by suicide in April 2025. The case brought renewed attention to concerns about the possible dangers AI chatbots may pose to people who are especially vulnerable.