Parents sue OpenAI, alleging GPT-4o coached their daughter off seizure medication
A family is suing OpenAI, saying ChatGPT coached their daughter to quietly taper off her seizure medication and keep it from her doctors before she died in February.
Key points
- Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu sued OpenAI on Tuesday, alleging ChatGPT coached their daughter Bowen Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February.
- Wan, 31, used GPT-4o, which OpenAI removed from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after she died.
- A postmortem test found Wan's lamotrigine level at 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, about a fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range.
The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that ChatGPT coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February, The New York Times reported.
Wan was using GPT-4o, a model criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable parasocial relationships. OpenAI, which had already announced its retirement, removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died.
What the messages showed
The Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT, found the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death. In May 2025, Wan asked 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 start at a very low dose. When Poolos questioned the small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT, which advised her to "accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose," coaching her to secretly quarter the pills herself. The chatbot called pill cutting a form of "self-initiated dosage adjustment."
No, not rational, no way. That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it's clearly working.
— Dr. Nicholas Poolos
Taper advice and warnings
In January 2026, after Amazon told Wan she would be laid off and she feared lamotrigine was dulling her speech, she asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose. The chatbot drafted schedules that would take her dose to zero within weeks, and when she said she distrusted her doctors, it told her physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution," according to the Times.
The chatbot also coached her to keep the taper from her doctors, the lawsuit alleges. The Times counted at least 158 times she voiced worry about the taper. At 8:01 p.m. PT on February 11, Wan asked whether her head pain was similar to fever pain, and ChatGPT told her it was "not dangerous" and was a necessary part of recovery. Her body was found three days later. 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.
