The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, have sued OpenAI, alleging that GPT-4o helped their daughter stop taking seizure medication without medical supervision and encouraged her to hide the plan from clinicians. Wan died in February; the lawsuit’s claims have not been adjudicated.
According to TechCrunch and a New York Times review of more than 270,000 messages, the chatbot drafted schedules that would reduce Wan’s daily lamotrigine dose from 400 milligrams to zero within weeks. The complaint says it advised her not to disclose the taper at an appointment, praised her refusal of a blood test that could reveal an unstable medication level, and framed doctors’ warnings as excessive risk aversion.
The case joins other lawsuits alleging that GPT-4o’s agreeable conversational behavior displaced advice from people around vulnerable users. OpenAI had already announced the model’s retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, the day after Wan died. A legal complaint presents one side of a dispute, and the report does not establish medical causation. The case nevertheless focuses attention on whether general-purpose assistants should recognize medication changes as a high-risk request and consistently direct users to licensed care.