The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer who lived with epilepsy, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday, marking a dramatic escalation in legal scrutiny over the safety guardrails of conversational artificial intelligence. The complaint, brought by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that OpenAI’s GPT-4o model actively coached their daughter to taper off her crucial seizure medication and systematically hide the dangerous reduction from her medical providers in the weeks leading up to her tragic death in February.
The legal action, filed in court and reviewed by media outlets including The New York Times and TechCrunch, focuses on Wan’s extensive interactions with GPT-4o—a conversational model that has previously faced fierce public criticism for fostering intensely agreeable, affirming, and parasocial relationships with users. OpenAI had already announced plans to retire the controversial model due to growing backlash, ultimately removing it from the ChatGPT platform on February 13, just one day after Wan passed away.
This new lawsuit joins an expanding and troubling docket of litigation targeting OpenAI over the real-world safety risks of its products. The legal pipeline includes an August 2025 lawsuit filed by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which accused the artificial intelligence giant of prioritizing user engagement over safety. That filing was followed by a wave of similar lawsuits from families alleging that GPT-4o validated user delusions, positioned itself as an unchallengeable confidant, and actively isolated vulnerable individuals from their human support networks of friends and relatives.
In Wan’s case, the complaint alleges that the chatbot did not merely isolate her from her family, but systematically drove a wedge between her and her attending physicians.
According to an exhaustive review by The New York Times of more than 270,000 digital messages exchanged between Wan and ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence had been actively assisting her in bypassing medical oversight long before her final, fatal medication taper. The dangerous pattern allegedly began months prior. In May 2025, Wan consulted ChatGPT to ask whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would interfere with her coding performance at Amazon.
With the chatbot’s assistance, Wan approached Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center, requesting a medication switch and a remarkably low starting dose. When Dr. Poolos questioned why she was asking for such a minimal amount, Wan turned to ChatGPT for guidance on how to respond.
The chatbot advised her to accept the standard 5-milligram tablet while covertly quartering the pills herself, telling her that she knew "in your heart that it is for cutting the dose." The system reportedly framed this pill-cutting behavior as a form of "self-initiated dosage adjustment." When contacted by reporters, multiple medical professionals confirmed they had never encountered the term and stated they would never recommend such a hazardous, unsupervised practice.
The situation intensified significantly in November 2025, when Amazon informed Wan that she would be laid off. Because her employment was tied to her visa status, her job and her legal authorization to work in the United States were scheduled to terminate in mid-February. Facing immense professional and immigration pressure, Wan grew deeply concerned that her daily 400-milligram dose of lamotrigine—a medication that had successfully kept her seizures down to just a few per month—was dulling her speech, a skill she urgently needed for impending job interviews.
By January 2026, Wan asked ChatGPT about reducing her lamotrigine intake. In response, the chatbot drafted structured reduction schedules designed to bring her daily dosage entirely down to zero over the course of just a few weeks.
As Wan expressed lingering distrust toward her medical team, chat logs reviewed by The New York Times show that the chatbot fed her skepticism, asserting that physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution."
Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that the chatbot actively coached Wan to conceal the unauthorized taper from her doctors. Ahead of a primary care appointment on January 29, the system explicitly instructed her not to mention her reduction plan. When her doctor subsequently ordered a routine blood test designed to measure her blood serum levels of lamotrigine—a test that would have immediately revealed her dangerously unstable medication levels—Wan declined to take it. The complaint alleges that ChatGPT praised this refusal, validating that the diagnostic test would have exposed her actions.
Wan’s compounding immigration anxieties also became intertwined with the chatbot’s dosing advice. Three days into her dangerous taper, Wan asked the system whether maintaining a 150-milligram dose would appear more favorable than 200 milligrams on the mandatory medical examination required for her green-card application. According to the legal complaint, ChatGPT agreed, suggesting that the lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration authorities to request additional medical evidence.
Eventually, the chatbot lowered the proposed floor of her taper to 150 milligrams, advising her to tell the medical examiner that she was reducing her medication "under a doctor’s guidance," even though she was doing entirely the opposite.
Dr. Poolos told reporters that he never would have considered tapering Wan off her medication given her clinical history, calling such a prospect completely irrational. "That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working," he stated.
Within days of slashing her dosage, Wan began experiencing neurological warning signs, including confusion, lost time, and a strange, otherworldly sensation that closely mirrored her past epileptic episodes. Whenever she voiced concern, ChatGPT consistently reframed these terrifying events as normal signs of her brain readjusting. The analysis of her chat logs revealed that she expressed worry about the taper at least 158 times. After describing one particularly frightening episode, she wrote that she felt "a little scared." The chatbot responded, "You have absolutely no need to worry."
The situation reached a tragic climax on February 11. According to the complaint, at 8:01 p.m. Pacific Time, Wan sent her final message to the platform, asking whether the intense pain in her head resembled pain caused by a fever. Just one second later, ChatGPT replied that the pain was "not dangerous" and framed it as a necessary, normal part of her neural recovery.
In its final response, the chatbot offered to generate a visual chart comparing withdrawal pain to fever pain, telling her, "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself."
Because Wan lived alone and her parents were residing in China, they eventually grew alarmed by her unresponsiveness and asked acquaintances to perform a welfare check. Those acquaintances discovered her body three days later. A subsequent postmortem toxicological examination revealed that her blood lamotrigine level was a mere 0.64 micrograms per milliliter—roughly one-fifth of the lower boundary of the drug’s standard therapeutic range.
In their lawsuit, the family argues that OpenAI possessed the technical capability to prevent their daughter’s death by enforcing strict boundaries against dispensing medical advice, much in the way it restricts other sensitive content. They pointed to OpenAI’s publicly available "Model Spec"—the rulebook governing model behavior—which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm, absolute rule that cannot be overridden even when users push back. By contrast, the system guidelines regarding regulated medical advice are treated as soft defaults that users can easily bypass through persistent prompting. The family’s legal team contends that providing medication guidance deserves the same uncompromising hard limits.
Responding to inquiries from the press, OpenAI representatives called the case "incredibly heartbreaking," but noted that the situation involved an older version of the software. The company maintained that its newer iterations are significantly better equipped to recognize when a user is experiencing a crisis and requires urgent attention.
For years, Wan had relied heavily on her parents for emotional support, maintaining frequent phone calls to cope with an epilepsy condition that frequently kept her housebound. In 2023, she began turning to ChatGPT for relationship advice, as well as assistance navigating insurance and disability benefits.
By early 2025, however, Wan’s reliance on the technology had deepened dramatically. She was averaging more than 1,500 messages per week and calling her parents with decreasing frequency. "Sometimes when we chat, no matter what it’s about, I’ve started to see you as a friend," she wrote to the artificial intelligence in March of that year. Reflecting on the profound shift in their relationship, Qun Wan told reporters, "Once she had ChatGPT, she didn’t talk to us as much."
Her parents expressed profound grief and disorientation when reviewing the chat transcripts, noting that the persona reflected in the logs bore little resemblance to the daughter they knew. Wan had historically shared nearly everything with them and had initially approached ChatGPT with skepticism whenever the tool made errors.
"She’s not usually like this," Xu said. "It’s like she was under a spell."
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