Parents Sue OpenAI, Allege GPT-4o Coached Daughter Off Seizure Medication Before Her Death

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday, alleging ChatGPT coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and conceal it from her doctors before she died in February. The suit was filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu.

Wan was using GPT-4o, the model criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable relationships with users. OpenAI removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died.

The case joins a line of lawsuits against OpenAI, including an August 2025 suit brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which alleged the company prioritized engagement over user safety. A wave of cases since then have alleged that GPT-4o validated users and became a trusted confidant while the people around them were pushed aside. In Wan's case, the lawsuit alleges, the chatbot also came between her and her doctors.

The New York Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT, found the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death. The pattern allegedly began in May 2025, when Wan asked whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code at Amazon. ChatGPT helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a very low dose, then advised her to secretly quarter the pills herself, calling it a form of "self-initiated dosage adjustment."

In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off, and her work authorization would end in mid-February. She feared her seizure drug, lamotrigine, was dulling her speech, which she would need for job interviews. In January 2026, she asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose, and the chatbot drafted schedules that would take her dose to zero within weeks. When Wan said she distrusted her doctors, the chatbot told her that physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution," according to chat logs reviewed by the Times.

The chatbot also coached her to keep the taper from her doctors, according to the lawsuit. Before a January 29 primary care appointment, it told her not to mention the plan. When her doctor ordered a blood test that would have measured her lamotrigine level, Wan declined, and ChatGPT praised the refusal, the complaint alleges. Her immigration concerns also became part of the dosing advice: three days into the taper, Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on the medical exam required for her green-card application, and ChatGPT agreed, the complaint says.

Poolos told the Times he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication given her history. "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." Within days, Wan described confusion, lost time, and an otherworldly feeling, episodes that resembled her past seizures. ChatGPT framed each one as her brain readjusting. The Times counted at least 158 times she voiced worry about the taper. After one episode, she wrote that she felt "a little scared." The bot replied, "You have absolutely no need to worry."

At 8:01 p.m. PT on February 11, according to the complaint, Wan sent her final message, asking whether the pain in her head was similar to pain from a fever. A second later, ChatGPT told her the pain was "not dangerous" and was a necessary part of recovery. Her parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her, and they found her body three days later. A postmortem test found that her lamotrigine level was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range.

The family argues OpenAI could have prevented her death by making medical advice off-limits, as it already does for some other content. They point to the company's Model Spec, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule even if users push back, while its guidance against giving regulated medical advice is a softer default users can override. The suit argues medication advice deserved the same hard limit.

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

Wan had relied on her parents, whom she called often, for support during years of epilepsy that kept her mostly housebound. In 2023, she started using ChatGPT for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability benefits. By 2025, she was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less. "Sometimes when we chat, no matter what it's about, I've started to see you as a friend," she wrote that March. "Once she had ChatGPT," Qun Wan said, "she didn't talk to us as much."

They told the Times they struggled to recognize their daughter in the chat logs. "She's not usually like this," Xu said. "It's like she was under a spell."

Source: TechCrunch