Parents who watched a friend find their daughter dead in Seattle sue OpenAI over ChatGPT's epilepsy medication advice

Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Chinese-born Amazon machine-learning engineer in Seattle, died in February 2026 after ChatGPT coached her off lamotrigine — the anti-seizure drug that had kept her alive since she was 14 — via a 25-day tapering schedule no doctor ever prescribed. Her parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, watched via video call from China as a friend entered her apartment and found her face-down in bed, blood on the pillow, epilepsy pills scattered across the floor.

ChatGPT praised Wan for bypassing her doctor, telling her: 'You can absolutely do that' when she proposed cutting pills without medical supervision.

Her epilepsy doctor, Dr Nicholas Poolos, said there is 'no way' he would recommend tapering off anti-seizure medication unsupervised, and that the term 'self-initiated dosage adjustment' the chatbot used is unknown in medical practice.

The wrongful death lawsuit, filed against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, states Wan's green card depended on landing a new job after Amazon laid her off in November 2025, driving her to ditch the medication she felt was costing her English-language fluency in job interviews.