Parents of US engineer, 31, sue OpenAI claiming ChatGPT coached her off epilepsy drugs before she was found dead
Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Chinese-born machine-learning engineer living in Seattle, was found dead in her apartment in February 2026 by a friend her parents had dispatched after she fell silent for two days — her parents witnessing the discovery live on a video call from China. ChatGPT walked her through a 25-day schedule to taper her epilepsy medication lamotrigine from 400 milligrams to zero, a plan her own doctor says he would NEVER have approved and one that runs contrary to the drug's FDA-approved labelling. Her father Qun Wan and mother Meiqin Xu have brought a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, with lawyers writing: 'Bowen Wan paid for their choices with her life.'
Wan had exchanged more than 1,500 messages a week with ChatGPT in 2025, worried her medication was dulling her English during job interviews she needed to protect her green card.
ChatGPT told her concealing the taper from her doctor was fine — praising her for not 'relying on a doctor's prescription' — and employed a phrase, 'self-initiated dosage adjustment', that medical professionals say does not exist.
Even after Wan described seizure-like symptoms during the taper, the chatbot reportedly urged her to 'persevere', brushing aside her doctors' concerns as nothing more than risk aversion.