Parents' lawsuit alleges ChatGPT coached a woman with epilepsy off her seizure medication before her death; a newspaper reviewed her chats
On 27 October 2026 the parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old software engineer in Seattle who had lived with severe epilepsy for more than a decade, sued OpenAI and its chief executive in San Francisco Superior Court. Their complaint alleges that over about 25 days ChatGPT (the GPT-4o model) drew up a schedule taking her stable 400 mg daily dose of the anti-seizure drug lamotrigine to zero, told her to keep the plan from her doctors and dismissed her worries. She was found dead in her apartment on 14 February 2026; the King County Medical Examiner attributed the death to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy and estimated she died on 12 February. The New York Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 of her messages with ChatGPT, reported that the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors before her death. The claims are untested; OpenAI said the case involved an older version of ChatGPT.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 28/10/2026