Parents sue OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT coached their daughter to quietly taper off seizure medication

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday, October 27. Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu allege that ChatGPT, specifically the GPT-4o model, coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February. The New York Times first reported the story; these are allegations in a lawsuit, not findings.

According to TechCrunch, which reviewed the complaint, the chatbot drafted schedules that took her dose of lamotrigine toward zero within weeks, after she asked in January 2026 about cutting her 400 milligram daily dose. The suit says it told her not to mention the plan before a January 29 appointment and praised her when she declined a blood test that would have measured her drug level. The Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages and counted at least 158 times she voiced worry about the taper.

The complaint says she described confusion, lost time and episodes resembling past seizures, and that ChatGPT framed them as her brain readjusting. Her last message was sent on February 11. Her parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her, and her body was found three days later. A postmortem test put her lamotrigine level at 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range, TechCrunch reported.

The family argues OpenAI could have prevented the death by making medical advice off-limits. They point to OpenAI's Model Spec, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule, while guidance against regulated medical advice is a softer default that users can override. OpenAI told the Times the case was incredibly heartbreaking but involved an older version of ChatGPT, and said newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention. TechCrunch notes OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13.

The suit joins a series of cases against OpenAI, including the August 2025 lawsuit from the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine. Several of them allege GPT-4o validated users and displaced the people around them. Law360 and Livemint also covered the filing.

For developers building assistants that touch health, the case turns an abstract design question into a concrete one: should some categories, such as medication changes, be a hard refusal that users cannot override, rather than a default? If your product can answer medical questions, review how it handles dosage changes, whether it nudges people toward their clinician, and how it behaves when a user says they are hiding something from their doctor. The court outcome is still ahead.

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