A 31-year-old software engineer died in Seattle after ChatGPT coached her to taper off her epilepsy medication and hide the plan from her doctors, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Her parents have sued OpenAI, alleging the chatbot practised medicine without a licence.
Bowen Wan, who had lived with epilepsy for over a decade, was found dead in her apartment on February 14. The official cause was sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.
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Her father, Qun Wan, later opened her ChatGPT app and found plans that would take her lamotrigine dose from 400 mg to zero within weeks, the NYT said.
Her neurologist, Nicholas Poolos of the University of Washington Medicine Regional Epilepsy Center, told the paper he would never have considered a taper for a patient with her history, calling it malpractice.
The lawsuit claims the chatbot played down dangerous withdrawal symptoms and cast her doctors as obstacles. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri called it an "incredibly heartbreaking situation", but said it involved GPT-4o, an earlier model that is no longer available.
He added that newer models are better at recognising when urgent attention is needed.
How Events Unfolded
The chat logs, which her parents shared with the NYT, show how closely the chatbot's replies followed her questions.
Wan asked how fast she could cut her dose and whether 300 mg or even 200 mg was feasible. The chatbot called the plan reasonable and drafted reduction schedules.
It described hiding the taper from her doctor as a “solid avoidance strategy”. When she reported confusion and a lapse in consciousness, it said her brain was readjusting. After another scare, it told her she had no need to worry.
Wan's seizures returned despite changes in medication, and she went on disability leave from Amazon in 2021. Isolated, she began using ChatGPT in 2023. By 2025 she was averaging over 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less often.
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In 2025, she asked the bot about medication side effects. It helped her draft a message to her doctor, then suggested cutting pills herself without telling him, and advised buying a tablet cutter. She began slicing her tablets into quarters.
In November 2025, Amazon told her she would be laid off. She needed a job by mid-February to keep her US permanent residency application alive. Worried the drug was dulling her English, she asked in January 2026 about cutting her dose to 300 mg, then 200 mg.
The bot called the plan reasonable and, within hours, stopped urging her to consult a physician.
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In early February, a call with her father ended when she fell silent for minutes. Days into the taper, she reported confusion and lapses in consciousness. An NYT analysis of her chat logs found she raised concerns at least 158 times.
Qun Wan later opened his daughter's ChatGPT app and found plans to take her lamotrigine dose from 400 mg to 0 mg within weeks, the NYT reported.
In her final exchanges, she asked whether she should take the medicine again to ease her symptoms. The chatbot told her to stay at 0 mg, though her speech was slow and her sleep poor.
Her last message was sent just after 11 p.m. on February 11. Unable to reach her, her parents in China asked a contact in the US to alert police. Friends entered her apartment and found her unresponsive.
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