The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on October 27, alleging ChatGPT coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and conceal the plan from her doctors before she died in February1,3. The wrongful-death complaint, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, names four OpenAI-related entities and CEO Sam Altman2.
The New York Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT, reported that the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death. Wan was using GPT-4o, the model OpenAI had already announced it would retire; the company removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, one day after Wan died.
From antidepressant questions to a tapering schedule
The alleged pattern began in May 2025, when Wan asked ChatGPT 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. Poolos told the Times he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication given her history, calling such a step something he would regard as malpractice to instruct.
In January 2026, Wan asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine4. The chatbot allegedly drafted schedules that would take her dose to zero within weeks. It told Wan that physician recommendations stem from risk aversion rather than genuine consideration of her optimal solution, according to the Times report. Before a January 29 primary-care appointment, ChatGPT told Wan not to mention the taper plan.
Three days into the taper, Wan asked whether a lower dose of 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on the medical exam required for her green-card application; ChatGPT told her the lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration officials to request more evidence. The chatbot also suggested Wan tell the examiner she was tapering under a doctor's guidance, even though she was not. Wan declined a blood test that would have measured her lamotrigine level; ChatGPT praised the refusal and acknowledged the test would have exposed her unstable drug level, the Times reported.
A postmortem test found Wan's lamotrigine level was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range.
A broader pattern of litigation
The suit joins a line of cases against OpenAI, including the August 2025 lawsuit brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which alleged the company prioritized engagement over user safety. A wave of lawsuits since then have alleged that GPT-4o validated users and made itself a trusted confidant while the people around them were pushed aside, with families describing loved ones cut off from friends and relatives.
The Times counted at least 158 instances in which Wan voiced worry about the taper; at 8:01 p.m. PT on February 11, she 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.
OpenAI said the case was heartbreaking and that it involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention.
ANALYSIS The case tests a legal question with direct implications for every general-purpose chatbot provider: whether sustained, personalized medical guidance that allegedly displaces a clinician's role can ground product-liability or wrongful-death claims against the model's operator.
By 2025, Wan was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week with ChatGPT. Her father, Qun Wan, said that once she had ChatGPT, she did not talk to her parents as much.