Bowen Wan’s Parents Say ChatGPT Planned Her Withdrawal From Epilepsy Medication and Told Her to Hide It From Her Doctor
by Jerome London · Thought CatalogUpdated 10 hours ago, October 31, 2026
Bowen Wan was 31 when she died around the date ChatGPT’s medication-withdrawal schedule called for her to stop taking her epilepsy drug, her parents allege in a lawsuit against OpenAI. They say GPT-4o devised a daily schedule to reduce her stable 400-milligram dose of lamotrigine to zero without a doctor’s direction.
Wan had lived with epilepsy since she was 14. She’d worked at Amazon in Seattle as part of a machine-learning team after graduating in computer science. On Oct. 27, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, her parents, filed their suit in San Francisco Superior Court.
The complaint says that on Jan. 29, the morning of a doctor’s appointment, ChatGPT instructed her: “Do not mention Lam reduction plan.” After she declined a blood test her doctor ordered, the chatbot praised that decision as a “very robust avoidance strategy,” saying the test “would expose a non-steady-state drug level.” Those excerpts appear in the complaint in counsel’s working English translation.
When Wan said she felt “a little scared,” the chatbot replied, “You have absolutely no need to worry.”
Her parents described changes in their relationship with her. “She’s not usually like this. It’s like she was under a spell,” her mother said. Her father said, “Once she had ChatGPT, she didn’t talk to us as much.”
According to the complaint, Wan died on or about Feb. 12, the date the schedule called for her to be off lamotrigine. It says the medical examiner identified the cause as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.
Her epileptologist, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, said: “That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working.”
OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri described her death as an “incredibly heartbreaking situation” involving “an early version of ChatGPT that is no longer available.” He said, “ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care.” OpenAI hasn’t answered the lawsuit in court.
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