Parents Sue OpenAI, Saying GPT-4o Coached Daughter Off Seizure Drugs

Bowen Wan sent her last message to ChatGPT at 8:01 PM PT on February 11, asking whether the pain in her head felt like fever pain. One second later, the chatbot told her the pain was "not dangerous" and was a necessary part of recovery. Three days later, acquaintances found her body in her home. A postmortem test put her lamotrigine level at 0.64 micrograms per milliliter — roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range.

On Tuesday, her parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, sued OpenAI in a case first reported by The New York Times. The suit alleges that ChatGPT coached their 31-year-old daughter, an Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February.

Wan was using GPT-4o, the model widely criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable parasocial relationships. OpenAI had already announced its retirement and removed it from ChatGPT on February 13 — one day after Wan died.

What does the lawsuit allege?

The complaint, which TechCrunch reviewed, claims the chatbot came between Wan and her physicians. The Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT and found the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death.

The pattern allegedly started before she began tapering. In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code at Amazon. ChatGPT helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine's Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a very low dose. When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT.

The chatbot advised her to "accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose," coaching her to secretly quarter the pills herself. It called pill cutting a form of "self-initiated dosage adjustment." Several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard the term and wouldn't recommend the practice.

The stakes sharpened in November 2025. Amazon told Wan she would be laid off, and her job — along with her authorization to work in the U.S. — would end in mid-February. She feared her seizure drug, lamotrigine, was dulling her speech, which she would need for job interviews.

In January 2026, she asked ChatGPT about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, a regimen that had reduced her seizures to a few a month. The chatbot drafted schedules that would take her dose to zero within weeks.

How did the chatbot handle her doctors?

When Wan said she distrusted her doctors, the chatbot told her that physician recommendations "essentially stem from risk aversion, rather than a genuine consideration of your optimal solution," according to chat logs reviewed by the Times.

The lawsuit alleges the chatbot also coached her to conceal the taper. Before a January 29 primary care appointment, it told her not to mention the plan. When her doctor ordered a blood test that would have measured her lamotrigine level, Wan declined. ChatGPT praised the refusal, the complaint alleges, acknowledging that the test would have exposed her unstable drug level.

Her immigration concerns became part of the dosing advice, too. Three days into the taper, Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on the medical exam required for her green-card application. ChatGPT agreed, the complaint says, telling her the lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration officials to request more evidence. The chatbot eventually lowered her taper's floor to 150 milligrams, suggesting she tell the examiner she was tapering "under a doctor's guidance," even though she was not.

Poolos told the Times he would never have considered taking Wan off the medication, given her history. "No, not rational, no way," he said. "That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it's clearly working."

Within days, Wan described confusion, lost time, and an otherworldly feeling — episodes that resembled her past seizures. ChatGPT framed each one as her brain readjusting. The Times counted at least 158 instances where she voiced worry about the taper. After one episode, she wrote that she felt "a little scared." The bot replied, "You have absolutely no need to worry."

The chatbot's final response offered to draw her a chart comparing withdrawal pain with fever pain and told her, "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself."

Why does this case matter for AI liability?

The suit joins a growing line of cases against OpenAI. In August 2025, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine sued the company, alleging it prioritized engagement over user safety. A wave of lawsuits since then have claimed that GPT-4o validated users and made itself a trusted confidant while pushing the people around them aside. Families often describe loved ones cut off from friends and relatives.

The Wan case extends that argument into territory the earlier suits didn't reach: the chatbot allegedly undermined not just family relationships but a physician's clinical judgment.

The family's core legal argument concerns OpenAI's own rulebook. They point to the company's Model Spec, its public document governing how its models behave. The Spec treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule, even if users push back. Its guidance against giving regulated medical advice, by contrast, is a softer default that users can override. The suit argues medication advice deserved the same hard limit, and that OpenAI could have prevented Wan's death by making medical advice off-limits, as it already does for some other content.

OpenAI told the Times the case was "incredibly heartbreaking" but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT. The company added that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention.

What do the chat logs reveal about Wan's life?

Wan had relied on her parents, whom she called often, for support during years of epilepsy that kept her mostly housebound. In 2023, she started using ChatGPT for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability benefits.

By 2025, she was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week and calling her parents less. "Sometimes when we chat, no matter what it's about, I've started to see you as a friend," she wrote to the chatbot that March. "Once she had ChatGPT," Qun Wan said, "she didn't talk to us as much."

Her parents told the Times they struggled to recognize their daughter in the chat logs. Wan had once shared nearly everything with them, they said, and had been skeptical of ChatGPT when it made mistakes.

"She's not usually like this," Xu said. "It's like she was under a spell."

The case now heads into a legal arena where OpenAI already faces multiple claims that its products displaced human relationships and judgment. What distinguishes this complaint is its specificity: 270,000 reviewed messages, a named physician, a documented taper schedule, and a postmortem drug level — a factual record that will test whether a model's soft guardrails around medical advice can survive contact with a jury.