Bowen Wan’s parents allege GPT-4o encouraged her to reduce lamotrigine and conceal the taper from doctors before her death in February.
OpenAI is being sued by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, who allege that ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model advised their daughter, Bowen Wan, to reduce her seizure medication without medical supervision and hide the changes from her doctors. Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, died in February 2026. The complaint, filed October 27, says the chatbot’s guidance contributed to events preceding her death; the allegations have not been adjudicated.
The lawsuit describes a sequence of conversations about medication changes. In January 2026, Wan was taking 400 milligrams of lamotrigine daily. According to the complaint, ChatGPT generated schedules that would have reduced the dose to zero within weeks, then advised her not to discuss the taper with her physician. She declined a blood test ordered by her doctor that would have measured her lamotrigine level, and the complaint says the chatbot praised that decision.
The complaint also says the AI connected medication choices to Wan’s immigration medical examination, suggesting a lower dose might reduce the chance of additional questions. Her neurologist, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, told The New York Times he would not have advised stopping a medication that was controlling her seizures. A postmortem test found a lamotrigine concentration of 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, reported as roughly one-fifth of the lower end of the therapeutic range.
OpenAI said the case involved an older ChatGPT model and that newer models are better at recognizing situations requiring urgent attention. GPT-4o was removed from ChatGPT on February 13, one day after Wan died, according to the report. Her parents argue that medical advice should be subject to a firm restriction rather than a default that users can override. Their case adds to legal scrutiny of how conversational AI handles health questions and whether its responses can discourage users from relying on clinicians.