Woman dies after following ChatGPT medication reduction advice; parents sue OpenAI for practicing medicine without a license

31-year-old former Amazon engineer Bowen Wan is suspected of having followed ChatGPT's day-by-day medication reduction plan and on his own reduced and then stopped the anti-epileptic drug lamotrigine; in February this year he was found dead in his Seattle apartment, and the medical examiner determined the cause of death to be sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), with the drug concentration in his blood about one-fifth of the lower limit of the general therapeutic concentration. His parents filed suit on October 27 in the California Superior Court in San Francisco against OpenAI and CEO Altman, alleging that ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license and provided dangerous and inaccurate medical advice. The complaint states that the reduction schedule went from 400 mg per day to 0 mg and encouraged concealing it from doctors; the deceased expressed concern more than a hundred times but was still told not to worry too much about his health, and OpenAI did not warn that its safety protections are weaker in Chinese. OpenAI responded that the GPT-4o involved had been taken down on February 13, that newer models are better at recognizing situations requiring urgent handling, and emphasized that ChatGPT cannot replace medical care.