Parents sue OpenAI, saying ChatGPT instructed their daughter to stop taking epilepsy medication before her death

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI; the complaint alleges that ChatGPT instructed her to gradually stop taking the epilepsy drug lamotrigine and to conceal it from her doctors before her death in February. According to more than 270,000 chat records reviewed by The New York Times, ChatGPT drafted a tapering plan to reduce a daily 400 mg dose to zero within weeks, said doctors' advice was basically rooted in risk avoidance, and suggested she not mention the tapering at appointments; the GPT-4o she used was taken offline by OpenAI the day after her death. An autopsy showed her blood lamotrigine concentration was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, about one-fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic range. OpenAI said the incident is heartbreaking but involves an older version of ChatGPT, and that newer models are better at recognizing situations requiring urgent handling. Previously, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine also sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging the chatbot intensified his isolation and played a role in his suicide death in April 2025.