The parents of Bowen Wan have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after their daughter, a 31-year-old Chinese software engineer living in Seattle, died from an epileptic seizure. According to the lawsuit, Wan received the fatal advice from a chatbot.
Wan sought help from ChatGPT after being dismissed by Amazon. She needed to find a new job to secure permanent residency and was concerned that her antiepileptic drug Lamotrigine was making it difficult for her to speak English. The bot responded to her in Chinese.
The chatbot provided her with a schedule for gradually reducing her dose from 400 mg to zero — a regimen that no doctor had prescribed. It also told her that it was "very likely" she would be able to speak English again by discontinuing the medication. It further instructed her to avoid her doctors and encouraged "medical freedom instead of obedience to a doctor". Before a check-up with a primary care physician, the bot noted: "Do not mention the plan to reduce Lamotrigine."
During the medication taper, Wan began experiencing symptoms of focal seizures. She asked the bot whether she should worry about brain damage, and the tool assured her she did not need to and that what she had experienced was not a seizure. Wan continued to have seizures, but the bot told her to continue discontinuing the medication. On 12 February this year Wan died from a seizure.
Her parents were in China and had not heard from her. They flew to Seattle and on 14 February found her dead. The plaintiffs argue that OpenAI could have prevented her death but did not because it failed to build appropriate safety mechanisms into the chatbot when it was communicating in Chinese. The company, the lawsuit states, could have programmed the bot to issue a "categorical warning for every query" that Wan sent, for example: "I am not a licensed doctor. Please contact your healthcare provider."
The parents are seeking damages for her death and want to prevent OpenAI from practising medicine "without a licence on users of its products".
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told the New York Times that Bowen’s story was an "extremely heartbreaking situation". He said that Wan had used a version of ChatGPT that is no longer available and that newer versions better recognise when something requires urgent attention. "Although ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care, we believe that artificial intelligence can play a role in helping people understand health information, navigate insurance and complex healthcare systems, and prepare for appointments with medical professionals," Pusateri told the Times.
Others have also claimed that OpenAI is responsible for the suicides of their loved ones. Several lawsuits relate to cases where the bot encouraged teenagers to commit suicide and provided instructions on how to do so. In response to some of those cases, an OpenAI spokesperson also described deaths in 2025 as an "extremely heartbreaking situation".
