Family Sues OpenAI After Epileptic Woman Dies Following ChatGPT’s Advice to Taper Off Medication

OpenAI, the parent company of popular artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT, is being sued after a woman went to the AI chatbot for medical advice and died.

ABC affiliate KVUE reported on Wednesday, October 28, that Bowen Wan‘s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and the company’s founder, Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT was the reason for her death.

Wan, 31, was living in Seattle while her family was in China, according to court documents, when she was laid off from her job at Amazon in November 2025.

After Wan lost job, she feared being deported because her green card was set to expire on February 11. Desperate for a job, Wan reportedly believed that the medication she was taking for her epilepsy was affecting her cognitive abilities.

“From the age of seven, in Jiangsu, she had taught herself English via CD-ROM,” the lawsuit obtained by The New York Times stated. “On lamotrigine she was losing her words in English, in Mandarin, and in the Wu dialect she grew up speaking. She needed her English back for the job interviews ahead of her.”

She reportedly sought advice from ChatGPT, which allegedly created a plan to take her off the medication without consulting her doctor.

“GPT-4o told her the taper would give it back: her recovery was not just ‘possible’ — it is ‘highly likely,'” the lawsuit stated. (ChatGPT 4o is a version no longer available.)

The lawsuit claimed, per KVUE, that the chatbot worked with Wan to bring her 400-milligram lamotrigine dosage to almost nothing over the course of 25 days.

According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT told her, “Do not mention Lam reduction plan.”

KVUE reported that Wan’s family became worried after they didn’t hear from her for several days. They later discovered Wan dead in her apartment on February 14, via a video call with one of her friends.

The King County Medical Examiner reportedly stated that Wan died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Her postmortem blood contained lamotrigine at approximately one-fifth of the lowest concentration considered effective for her condition, per KVUE.

A spokesperson for OpenAI told People in a statement, “This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation and our thoughts are with all those impacted.”

“Working closely with clinicians and other experts, we have continued to strengthen how ChatGPT responds in sensitive and acute situations, while also continually improving how our latest models engage with users more broadly,” the statement continued.

“While ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care, we believe AI can play a role in helping people make sense of health information, navigate insurance and complex healthcare systems, and prepare for appointments with medical professionals,” the statement concluded.