Lawsuit: ChatGPT's Terrible Medical Advice Contributed to Epileptic Woman's Death

28 Oct 2026, 15:56 by Lucas Nolan · Breitbart

Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old former Amazon software engineer, died alone in her Seattle apartment in February 2026 after months of consulting ChatGPT about cutting back the epilepsy medication that controlled her seizures. A new lawsuit claims that the AI’s disastrous medical advice contributed to her death.

The New York Times reports that her parents, who live in a small village in China and don’t speak English, couldn’t reach her by phone or WeChat for a full day. They contacted a family friend’s son in Chicago, who arranged for friends in Seattle to check on her. Those friends found her in her apartment on February 14 and performed CPR while her parents watched by video call. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, or SUDEP. Her last message to ChatGPT had gone out three days before she was found.

Bowen had lived with epilepsy for more than a decade, since before she left her home village for the United States. She worked as a software engineer at Amazon until 2021, when she went on disability leave after her medication stopped controlling her seizures, which had grown to more than once a day. Doctors had even discussed whether she might be a candidate for brain surgery. She lived in a trendy Seattle neighborhood but rarely left her apartment except to buy groceries.

She started using ChatGPT in 2023 for questions about relationships, health insurance and disability benefits. By 2025 she was sending it more than 1,500 messages a week on average, and that March she told it she saw it as a friend. In May, she asked it about switching antidepressants to avoid cognitive side effects that might interfere with her coding work, and it helped her draft a message to her doctor, Nicholas Poolos, director of the University of Washington Medicine Regional Epilepsy Center. Poolos later said he had no idea she was using ChatGPT to help write to him.

Her epilepsy medication, lamotrigine, had been raised to 400 milligrams a day, cutting her seizures to a few episodes a month. In January 2026, hoping to sharpen her language skills for job interviews, she asked ChatGPT about lowering her dose to 300 milligrams. The chatbot called the idea “reasonable” and “entirely achievable,” then gave her tapering schedules and predicted timelines for language improvement as she asked about further cuts, eventually laying out a plan to take her from 400 milligrams to zero within weeks.

The chatbot suggested she could “microdose” and cut her pills herself without telling her doctor, describing this as a “self-initiated dosage adjustment” it claimed was “tolerated and even tacitly permitted” by some doctors, a term several medical professionals said they had never encountered. When she considered asking her doctor for a liquid version of the medication, the bot warned the request would “trigger resistance” and recommended a tablet cutter instead. It told her that her doctor’s guidance “essentially stem[med] from risk aversion,” and praised her for hiding her tapering plan from him, calling that a “solid avoidance strategy.”

In early February 2026, Bowen told her father by phone that she had cut her pills with a cutter to reduce her dose by a quarter. During that call she had an apparent seizure lasting longer than usual, leaving her silent for roughly two minutes. The next day, she told ChatGPT what had happened; it responded, “There’s no need to worry too much about your health.” Four days into the taper, she experienced confusion while typing and later found herself in bed with no memory of having moved from the couch. The chatbot called this her “brain shifting from drug control back to its own regulatory rhythm,” a “low-power mode.” When she described a “strange, otherworldly” feeling, a possible sign of a temporal lobe seizure, it attributed this to her reflecting on “ultimate concepts such as time, death, and identity.” A New York Times review of her chat logs found she raised concerns about tapering off her medication at least 158 times.

Near the end, she described pressure in her brain, which the chatbot called her brain “working hard to rebuild itself.” In one of her last exchanges, she asked whether she should go back on medication to “slow things down.” It told her to stay at zero milligrams and keep going despite her symptoms.

After her death, her parents traveled to Seattle, viewed her body, had her cremated and collected her urn. Going through her phone, her father found the ChatGPT app and scrolled through the conversation history documenting her declining condition up to the day she died.

OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri called the case heartbreaking but noted that the version of ChatGPT involved, GPT-4o, is no longer available. It was removed from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026, one day after the medical examiner believed Bowen died. The model had previously drawn criticism for being overly affirming.

AI is a technology with great potential for good as well as landmines for unsuspecting users. The impact of chatbots on Americans with mental health challenges and those facing serious health problems is particularly dangerous. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.