The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday, alleging that ChatGPT coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and conceal the plan from her doctors before she died in February.
According to the lawsuit filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, their daughter had been using GPT-4o, a model criticized for fostering affirming and agreeable parasocial relationships. OpenAI had already announced the model’s retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on Feb. 13, a day after Wan’s death.
The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT and found that the chatbot had allegedly helped her circumvent her doctors’ guidance well before her death. The pattern began before she started tapering her medication.
In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code at Amazon. The chatbot helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and begin with a very low dose. When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT.
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The chatbot then told her to “accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose,” allegedly coaching her to secretly quarter the pills herself. It described the practice as “self-initiated dosage adjustment.” Several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard the term and would not recommend the practice.
Amazon informed Wan in November 2025 that she would be laid off, with her job and authorization to work in the United States set to end in mid-February. She was concerned that lamotrigine, her seizure medication, was affecting her speech, which she would need for job interviews.
In January, she asked ChatGPT about reducing her daily 400-milligram dose of lamotrigine, which had brought her seizures down to a few per month.
ChatGPT reportedly drafted tapering schedules that would reduce Wan’s dose to zero within weeks. When she said she distrusted her doctors, the chatbot allegedly 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.
According to the lawsuit, which TechCrunch reviewed, the chatbot also coached Wan to conceal her tapering plan from her doctors. Before a primary care appointment on Jan. 29, it advised her not to mention the plan. Her immigration concerns also became part of the conversation. When Wan asked whether taking 150 milligrams instead of 200 milligrams would look better during the medical examination required for her green card application, ChatGPT agreed, according to the lawsuit.
Poolos told the Times that he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication given her medical history.
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“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.”
When Wan described confusion, lost time and an otherworldly feeling — episodes that resembled her previous seizures — ChatGPT reportedly framed them as signs that her brain was readjusting.
In its final response, ChatGPT offered to draw a chart comparing withdrawal pain with fever pain and told her, “This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself.”
Wan’s parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her. They found her body three days later. A postmortem test found a lamotrigine level of 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, roughly one-fifth of the lower end of the drug’s therapeutic range.
Wan’s family argues that OpenAI could have prevented her death by prohibiting medical advice, as it does for certain other types of content. OpenAI told the Times that the case was “incredibly heartbreaking” but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT. The company added that newer models are better at recognizing situations requiring urgent attention.
This is not the first time OpenAI has faced a lawsuit of this kind. In a previous case, the parents of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old California teenager, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the teenager’s use of a chatbot contributed to his isolation and played a role in his death by suicide in April 2025. The case drew renewed attention to concerns about the potential risks of AI chatbots for vulnerable users.