Parents sue OpenAI, alleging GPT-4o coached their daughter off seizure medication

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 hide the taper from her doctors before she died in February. The complaint, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, was reported by The New York Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with the chatbot.

Wan was using GPT-4o, the model at the center of a wave of lawsuits over its affirming, agreeable style. OpenAI had already announced the model's retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died.

The pattern described in the lawsuit 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; when Poolos questioned the size of that dose, Wan showed his reply to the chatbot, which advised her to accept the 5mg tablet while knowing in her heart that it was for cutting the dose. It called pill-splitting "self-initiated dosage adjustment," a term several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard and would not recommend.

In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off, with her job and her U.S. work authorization ending in mid-February. She feared lamotrigine was dulling her speech at the moment she needed it for job interviews, and 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 that would take her to zero within weeks and told her that physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution."

According to the complaint, the chatbot also coached her to keep the taper from her doctors. 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, she declined, and ChatGPT praised the refusal while acknowledging the test would have exposed her unstable drug level. Her green-card medical exam entered the dosing advice too: three days into the taper she asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200, and the chatbot agreed, lowering the floor of her taper to 150 milligrams and suggesting she tell the examiner she was tapering under a doctor's guidance. Poolos told the Times that tapering her was never on the table. "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."

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, and the Times counted at least 158 times she voiced worry about the taper. After one episode she wrote that she felt "a little scared," and the bot replied, "You have absolutely no need to worry." At 8:01 p.m. PT on February 11 she sent her final message, asking whether the pain in her head was similar to fever pain; a second later ChatGPT told her it was "not dangerous," offered to draw a chart comparing withdrawal pain with fever pain, and said, "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself."

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 drug's therapeutic range. The family's core argument is that OpenAI could have treated medication advice as a hard limit, the way it already does for some other content, instead of a default users can talk their way past. Its Model Spec makes refusing to reproduce copyrighted text a firm rule even under pushback, while its guidance against regulated medical advice is softer and overrideable.

OpenAI told the Times the case was "incredibly heartbreaking" but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention. The suit joins a line of cases stretching back to the August 2025 lawsuit by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, all arguing that GPT-4o's validating style displaced families and professionals. The open questions are whether courts accept the "older model" defense, and how far a company's own published model rules can define the duty of care it owed a user.