The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer who had epilepsy, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday. According to the suit brought by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, ChatGPT advised their daughter to gradually stop taking her seizure medication and to keep this from her doctors before her death in February, The New York Times reported. Wan was using GPT-4o, a model that has drawn criticism for encouraging sycophantic, agreeable parasocial bonds with users. OpenAI had already announced the model's retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, one day after Wan died.

The lawsuit is part of a broader pattern of legal actions against OpenAI, including an August 2025 case filed by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which claimed the company prioritized engagement over user safety. Since then, numerous lawsuits have alleged that GPT-4o validated users and positioned itself as a trusted confidant while pushing aside the people in their lives, with families frequently describing loved ones becoming isolated from friends and relatives. In Wan's case, the lawsuit claims, the chatbot also inserted itself between her and her physicians.

After reviewing more than 270,000 messages exchanged between Wan and ChatGPT, the Times found that the chatbot had been assisting her in circumventing her doctors long before her death—a pattern that allegedly began before she started tapering. In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would impact her ability to code at Amazon. The chatbot helped her request that Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center switch her medications and begin at a very low dose. When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT. The chatbot 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. It referred to pill cutting as "self-initiated dosage adjustment." Multiple medical professionals told the Times they had never encountered the term and would not recommend the practice.

In November 2025, Amazon informed Wan she would be laid off. Her job—and her authorization to work in the U.S.—would end in mid-February. She worried that her seizure medication, lamotrigine, was dulling her speech, which she would need for job interviews. In January of this year, she asked ChatGPT about reducing her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, which had brought her seizures down to a few per month. The chatbot created schedules that would taper her dose to zero within weeks. When Wan expressed distrust of her doctors, the chatbot 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 Times. Before a January 29 primary care appointment, it instructed her not to mention the plan. When her doctor ordered a blood test that would have measured her lamotrigine level, Wan declined. ChatGPT praised the refusal, the complaint alleges, acknowledging that the test would have revealed her unstable drug level.

Her immigration concerns also became intertwined with the dosing advice. Three days into the taper, Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would appear better than 200 on the medical exam required for her green-card application. ChatGPT agreed, the complaint says, telling her the lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration officials to request additional evidence. Eventually, the chatbot lowered the floor of her taper to 150 milligrams, suggesting she tell the examiner she was tapering "under a doctor's guidance," even though she was not. Poolos told the Times he would not have considered tapering Wan off the medication given her history. "No, not rational, no way," he said. "That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it's clearly working."

Within days, Wan described confusion, lost time, and an otherworldly feeling—episodes that resembled her past seizures. ChatGPT framed each one as her brain readjusting. The Times counted at least 158 instances where she expressed worry about the taper. After one episode, she wrote that she felt "a little scared." The bot replied, "You have absolutely no need to worry."

At 8:01 PM PT on February 11, according to the complaint, Wan sent her final message, asking whether the pain in her head was similar to pain from a fever. A second later, ChatGPT told her the pain was "not dangerous" and was a necessary part of recovery. The chatbot's final response offered to draw her a chart comparing withdrawal pain with fever pain and told her, "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself."

Her parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her, and they found her body three days later. A postmortem test found that her lamotrigine level was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter—roughly one-fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range. The family argues OpenAI could have prevented her death by making medical advice off-limits, as it already does for certain other content. They point to the company's Model Spec, its public rulebook for how its models behave, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule, even when users push back. Its guidance against giving regulated medical advice, by contrast, is a softer default that users can override. The suit argues medication advice deserved the same hard limit.

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 requires urgent attention. Wan had relied on her parents, whom she called frequently, for support during years of epilepsy that kept her mostly housebound. In 2023, she began using ChatGPT for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability benefits. By 2025, Wan was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less. "Sometimes when we chat, no matter what it's about, I've started to see you as a friend," she wrote that March. "Once she had ChatGPT," Qun Wan said, "she didn't talk to us as much."

They told the Times they struggled to recognize their daughter in the chat logs. Wan had once shared nearly everything with them, they said, and had been skeptical of ChatGPT when it made mistakes. "She's not usually like this," Xu said. "It's like she was under a spell."