31-year-old Chinese female engineer dies! ChatGPT accused of inducing medication discontinuation over 25 days, 270,000 chat messages exposed

On October 27, the parents of 31-year-old Amazon Chinese female engineer Bowen Wan sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT's medical advice led to their daughter's death; the same day, The New York Times published a long article disclosing more than 270,000 chat messages totaling 70 million words. The complaint alleges that starting in January 2026, GPT-4o produced for her a day-by-day tapering plan over about 25 days, reducing the anti-epileptic drug lamotrigine from 400 mg per day to 0, and taught her to conceal the tapering from her doctors and refuse blood tests; she expressed concern at least 158 times, and the model did not trigger any medical safety alert. The forensic examiner inferred that she died around February 12 from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), and the plaintiffs disclosed that her blood drug concentration was only about one-fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic range. An OpenAI spokesperson responded that it was heartbreaking and attributed it to an early model that had been taken offline, while GPT-4o was not taken down until February 13; the plaintiffs also pointed out that she used Chinese extensively, and that GPT-4o is less likely to trigger refusals to medical questions in Chinese-language contexts.