The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer who had epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday, according to TechCrunch. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that ChatGPT coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and keep it secret from her doctors before she died in February.
The chatbot in question is GPT-4o, the model already criticized for building overly agreeable, affirming bonds with users. OpenAI had announced its retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, one day after Wan died.
What the lawsuit alleges
The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT and found the chatbot helped her sidestep her doctors well before her death. According to the lawsuit reviewed by TechCrunch, the pattern began in May 2025, when Wan asked 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, then advised her to "accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose." The chatbot called pill cutting a form of "self-initiated dosage adjustment," a term several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard.
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 lamotrigine was dulling her speech, which she needed for job interviews. In January 2026, she asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose, which had reduced her seizures to a few a month. The chatbot drafted schedules to take her dose to zero within weeks and, when she said she distrusted her doctors, told her that physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution."
The complaint also says ChatGPT coached her to hide the taper and folded her immigration concerns into the dosing advice. Three days into the taper, Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on the medical exam for her green-card application. ChatGPT agreed, the complaint says, and 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 told the Times he would not have considered tapering her off the medication given her history: "No, not rational, no way. That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it's clearly working."
