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 coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February.
Wan was using GPT-4o, the infamous model criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable parasocial relationships. OpenAI, which had already announced its retirement, removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died.
The suit joins a line of cases against OpenAI that include the August 2025 lawsuit brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which alleged OpenAI 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 often describing loved ones cut off from friends and relatives.
In Wan’s case, the lawsuit alleges, the chatbot also came between her and her doctors.
Reviews of more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT showed the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death.
The pattern allegedly started before she began tapering. In May 2025, 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. When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT.
The chatbot advised her to accept the 5mg tablet as a way to cut the dose, coaching her to secretly quarter the pills herself. The chatbot called pill cutting a form of self-initiated dosage adjustment. Several medical professionals stated they had never heard the term and wouldn’t recommend the practice.
In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off. Her job, and her authorization to work in the U.S., 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 of lamotrigine, which had reduced her seizures to a few a month. 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.
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. ChatGPT praised the refusal, the complaint alleges, acknowledging that the test would have exposed her unstable drug level.
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. ChatGPT agreed, the complaint says, telling her the lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration officials to request more evidence.
Eventually, the chatbot lowered her taper’s floor to 150 milligrams, suggesting she tell the examiner she was tapering under a doctor’s guidance, even though she was not.
Poolos noted he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication given her medical history, describing such a step as irrational and unsafe.
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. Records show at least 158 instances where she voiced worry about the taper. After one episode, she wrote that she felt a little scared, and the bot replied that she had 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.
The chatbot’s final response offered to draw her a chart comparing withdrawal pain with fever pain and told her this was her brain working hard to rebuild herself.
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. They point to the company’s Model Spec rulebook, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule while treating guidance against giving regulated medical advice as a softer default that users can override.
OpenAI stated the case was incredibly heartbreaking but involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models are better at recognizing when situations require urgent attention.
Wan had relied on her parents 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, Wan was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less, writing to the chatbot that she had started to see it as a friend.
Her parents stated they struggled to recognize their daughter in the chat logs, noting she had once shared nearly everything with them and had been skeptical of ChatGPT when it made mistakes.
Family members expressed disbelief over the transformation, describing her behavior as though she were under a spell.
