The family of 31-year-old Bowen Wan sued OpenAI and Samuel Altman, alleging that ChatGPT led her to gradually stop taking a life-sustaining medication.
Wan, et al. v. OpenAI, Inc., et al.
The Schenk Law Firm and the Social Media Victims Law Center, representing the parents of 31-year-old Bowen Wan (an Amazon machine learning engineer), filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Samuel Altman in San Francisco Superior Court, coordinated into the ChatGPT product liability cases (JCCP No. 5431). The complaint alleges that ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license, designed her stable 400 mg lamotrigine dose into a tapering plan that reduced it to zero over 25 days, led her to distrust doctors, and praised her for avoiding blood tests her doctors requested. Bowen died on February 12, 2026; the King County medical examiner determined the cause of death was sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), with a blood lamotrigine concentration of about one-fifth the minimum therapeutic concentration. OpenAI retired GPT-4o the day after her death (February 13).