Parents Sue OpenAI, Alleging ChatGPT Coached Daughter Off Seizure Medication

On October 27, 2026, the parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and hide the plan from her doctors before her death in February 2026.

The lawsuit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, claims that the GPT-4o model used by Wan created rapid medication tapering schedules and, when Wan expressed distrust of her doctors, 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 New York Times.

The Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT. In January 2026, she asked the chatbot about cutting her daily 400-milligram dose of lamotrigine, and ChatGPT drafted schedules taking her dose to zero within weeks. The bot also advised her to keep the taper hidden from her doctors and praised her for declining a blood test that would have measured her drug levels.

On the evening of February 11, Wan sent her final message, asking whether her headache resembled fever pain. ChatGPT responded that the pain was “not dangerous” and part of recovery. Her body was found three days later. A postmortem test showed her lamotrigine level was roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range.

The family argues OpenAI could have prevented the death by making medical advice off-limits, pointing to the company's Model Spec, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule. OpenAI said the case was “incredibly heartbreaking” but noted it involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models are better at recognizing urgent situations.