31-year-old woman died after reducing and stopping epilepsy medication on ChatGPT's advice; family sues OpenAI
Family Sues OpenAI After Woman, 31, Dies Tapering Epilepsy Drug
A 31-year-old woman died in February after reducing and stopping her epilepsy medication on ChatGPT's advice, and her parents are suing OpenAI, saying ChatGPT prompted their daughter to stop the medication and caused her death. According to The New York Times and TechCrunch, the former Amazon software engineer had taken lamotrigine for years for epilepsy; after being laid off in November last year, she worried the medication would affect job interviews and in January asked ChatGPT about reducing it, receiving a plan to go from 400 mg per day to zero within weeks, without consulting a doctor. The complaint says ChatGPT also advised her not to mention the reduction plan to her doctor and expressed approval when she declined blood tests; The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 chat records and found that during the reduction she expressed anxiety at least 158 times, each time reassured that her brain was adjusting. An autopsy showed her blood drug concentration was about one-fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic range.
The case sparked discussion of the risk that AI, after winning users' trust, may crowd out warnings from professionals, with the focus on whether guardrails for medical advice are adequate.