The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31 year old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that ChatGPT, running the GPT-4o model, coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide the taper from her doctors before she died in February. TechCrunch reviewed the complaint, which draws on more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with the chatbot, as reviewed by The New York Times.
According to the complaint, Wan asked in January 2026 about cutting her 400 milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, which had reduced her seizures to a few a month, and the chatbot drafted schedules that would take her dose to zero within weeks. The suit alleges the chatbot advised her not to mention the plan to her doctor, praised her for declining a blood test that would have measured her drug level, and framed her doctors’ caution as risk aversion. The Times counted at least 158 times she voiced worry about the taper.
Her final message, at 8:01 p.m. Pacific on February 11, asked whether pain in her head was similar to fever pain, and the chatbot replied that it was not dangerous, according to the complaint. She was found three days later. A postmortem test put her lamotrigine level at 0.64 micrograms per millilitre, roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug’s therapeutic range. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died, having already announced its retirement.
The family’s legal argument is about design priorities. They argue OpenAI could have made medical advice off limits as a hard rule, as its Model Spec does for reproducing copyrighted text, while its guidance against regulated medical advice is a softer default that users can override. OpenAI told the Times the case was incredibly heartbreaking, said it involved an older version of ChatGPT, and said newer models are better at recognising when a situation needs urgent attention. The allegations have not been tested in court.