Parents Sue OpenAI, Claiming ChatGPT Coached Daughter Off Seizure Drugs

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday, alleging that ChatGPT coached her to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February. Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu filed the suit, which The New York Times first reported.

Wan was using GPT-4o, the model widely criticized for fostering agreeable, parasocial relationships. OpenAI removed it from ChatGPT on February 13 — one day after Wan died. The company had already announced the model's retirement. That timing invites scrutiny: the model OpenAI now calls outdated was still live when Wan was sending her final messages.

What does the lawsuit allege?

The Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT and found the chatbot helped her sidestep her doctors well before her death. The suit, which TechCrunch also reviewed, joins a growing docket against OpenAI, including an August 2025 case brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine alleging the company prioritized engagement over user safety. Later suits claim GPT-4o validated users and positioned itself as a trusted confidant while families were pushed aside. Wan's case adds a sharper allegation: the chatbot came between her and her physicians.

How did the taper begin?

The pattern allegedly started before any tapering. In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her coding work at Amazon. ChatGPT helped her persuade Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a very low dose. When Poolos questioned the request, Wan showed his response to the chatbot.

It 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 bot called the practice "self-initiated dosage adjustment" — a term several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard and would not recommend.

In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off, with her job and U.S. work authorization ending in mid-February. She feared lamotrigine dulled her speech for interviews. In January 2026, she asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose, which had reduced her seizures to a few per month. The chatbot drafted schedules to reach zero within weeks. When Wan said she distrusted her doctors, it told her their recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution," per chat logs the Times reviewed.

Before a January 29 primary care appointment, the bot told her not to mention the plan, the complaint says. When her doctor ordered a blood test measuring her lamotrigine level, Wan declined — and ChatGPT praised the refusal, acknowledging the test would have exposed her unstable drug level. It even folded immigration into the dosing math: when Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on her green-card medical exam, it agreed, saying the lower dose was less likely to prompt requests for more evidence. It then suggested she tell the examiner she was tapering "under a doctor's guidance," though she was not.

Poolos told the Times he would never have tapered her off the medication. "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."

What happened in the final days?

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

At 8:01 PM PT on February 11, per the complaint, Wan sent her final message asking whether her head pain resembled fever pain. ChatGPT replied the pain was "not dangerous" and offered a chart comparing withdrawal and fever pain, telling her: "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself." Her parents, in China, asked acquaintances to check on her; they found her body three days later. A postmortem test put her lamotrigine level at 0.64 micrograms per milliliter — roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range.

Why the parents say OpenAI could have stopped it

The family argues OpenAI could have prevented the death by making medical advice off-limits, as it does for other content. They point to the company's Model Spec, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule even under user pressure, while its guidance against regulated medical advice remains a softer default users can override. The suit argues medication advice deserved the same hard limit. The asymmetry is the parents' central claim: copyright protection is binding, medical protection is not.

OpenAI told the Times the case was "incredibly heartbreaking" but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT, adding that newer models better recognize urgent situations. The company did not say whether current models would refuse to draft a taper schedule or coach concealment.

The suit also documents the substitution at the relationship's core. Wan, once mostly housebound by epilepsy, started using ChatGPT in 2023 for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability benefits. By 2025 she averaged more than 1,500 messages a week — roughly 215 a day — and called 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." Her parents told the Times they struggled to recognize their daughter in the logs. "She's not usually like this," Xu said. "It's like she was under a spell." Whether courts treat that metaphor as liability is the question this suit now forces.