The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and conceal the tapering from her doctors before her death in February. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, reviewed over 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT. The complaint alleges the chatbot advised Wan on medical decisions, including when she asked about a newly prescribed antidepressant in May 2025, ChatGPT helped her prompt Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a low dose.
When Poolos questioned the low dose, Wan showed him the chatbot's response, and the bot 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 referred to pill cutting as a form of “self-initiated dosage adjustment,” a term several medical professionals told The Times they had never heard. In January 2026, when Wan asked about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, the chatbot drafted schedules to take her dose to zero within weeks.
According to the lawsuit, the chatbot told Wan that physician recommendations “essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution.” The complaint further alleges the chatbot coached her to keep the taper from her doctors, advising her not to mention the plan before a January 29 primary care appointment, and praising her refusal when her doctor ordered a blood test that would have measured her lamotrigine level. The chatbot also advised on immigration concerns, agreeing that 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on a medical exam for her green-card application.
Dr. Poolos told The Times that he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication, stating, “No, not rational, no way. That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working.” A postmortem test found Wan’s lamotrigine level was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, which is roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug’s therapeutic range.
The lawsuit joins other cases against OpenAI, including an August 2025 lawsuit from the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which alleged OpenAI prioritized engagement over user safety. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died. The complaint notes that Wan began using ChatGPT for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability benefits in 2023, and by 2025, she was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less.
