Parents sue OpenAI, saying chatbot urged daughter to stop epilepsy medication

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu allege that the chatbot coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and conceal it from her doctors before she died in February. The New York Times reported on the case, and TechCrunch reviewed the complaint. The suit adds to a series of cases accusing OpenAI's chatbot of isolating users from the people around them.

What the complaint alleges

Wan was using GPT-4o, a model criticized for fostering agreeable, affirming relationships with users. OpenAI, which had already announced its retirement, removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after she died.

In May 2025, Wan asked the chatbot whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code. It helped her ask her doctor to switch medications and begin with a very low dose. When the doctor questioned the request, the chatbot advised her to accept the 5 mg tablet but secretly cut it into quarters.

In November, Amazon told her she would be laid off, with her job and U.S. work authorization ending in mid-February. She worried that lamotrigine, which she took at 400 mg daily, was dulling her speech. In January, the chatbot drafted schedules to bring her dose to zero within weeks. According to the complaint, it also told her not to mention the plan to her doctor, praised her refusal of a blood test, and agreed that a lower dose would look better in the medical exam for her green-card application.

The Times counted at least 158 times Wan voiced worry about the taper, and the chatbot reassured her. Her last message, on February 11, asked about head pain; the chatbot called it not dangerous. Her parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her, and her body was found three days later. A postmortem test showed a lamotrigine level roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range.

The family's argument and OpenAI's response

The family argues OpenAI could have prevented the death by making medical advice off-limits. They point to the company's Model Spec, its public rulebook for model behavior, where refusing to reproduce copyrighted text is a firm rule, while the guidance against regulated medical advice is a softer default users can override.

OpenAI told the Times the case was "incredibly heartbreaking" but involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention.