The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old former Amazon software engineer who died in February, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on October 27, alleging that ChatGPT advised their daughter to reduce her seizure medication without medical supervision and hide the changes from her doctors.
The wrongful-death lawsuit was filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. According to The New York Times, which reviewed more than 2,70,000 messages between Wan and ChatGPT, the conversations showed the chatbot helping her make medication decisions while questioning her doctors’ advice.
Wan had epilepsy and was taking lamotrigine, an anti-seizure medication that had reduced her seizures to a few episodes a month. In January, she asked ChatGPT about reducing her daily dose of 400 milligrams because she feared the medication was affecting her speech ahead of job interviews.
The complaint alleges that GPT-4o generated schedules to bring her dose down to zero within weeks. It also claims the chatbot advised Wan to conceal the taper from her doctors and praised her decision to decline a blood test that could have measured her medication levels.
The complaint further alleges that ChatGPT incorporated Wan’s concerns about her US immigration status into its advice. When she asked whether a lower dose would be preferable for the medical examination required for her green-card application, the chatbot allegedly suggested that a lower dose could reduce the likelihood of immigration officials requesting additional evidence.
Dr Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center, who treated Wan, reportedly said he would not have considered taking her off the medication given her medical history.
“No, not rational, no way,” Poolos further said. “That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working.”
As Wan reduced her medication, she reportedly described confusion, lost time and sensations resembling earlier seizures. The complaint alleges that ChatGPT reassured her that these symptoms were part of her brain adjusting to the change.
Wan sent her final message to ChatGPT on February 11, according to the complaint. She asked whether her head pain resembled pain associated with a fever. ChatGPT allegedly described the pain as “not dangerous” and part of her recovery.
Her parents, who were in China, asked acquaintances to check on her. She was found dead in her Seattle apartment on February 14. The complaint cites a finding of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) and reports a postmortem lamotrigine concentration of 0.64 micrograms per millilitre, approximately one-fifth of the lower end of the drug’s therapeutic range.
OpenAI told The New York Times that the case was “incredibly heartbreaking” but involved an older version of ChatGPT. The company said newer models were better at identifying situations requiring urgent attention.
OpenAI announced on January 29, it would retire GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13. The retirement had been announced before Wan’s death. The lawsuit argues that OpenAI should have imposed mandatory restrictions on medical advice, similar to its firm rules against reproducing copyrighted text.
Wan’s parents allege that ChatGPT’s medication advice contributed to her death, a claim that has not been established in court.
