Seattle woman dies after stopping medication following ChatGPT tapering plan; parents sue OpenAI

A 31-year-old Chinese woman living in Seattle died after following a day-by-day tapering plan provided by ChatGPT and reducing her anti-epileptic medication to zero on her own. Her parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license and provided dangerous and inaccurate medical advice. OpenAI responded that this is a "heartbreaking event," but that the version involved was an early version that has since been taken down. The deceased was named Bowen Wan, from Jiangsu, a graduate of Arizona State University's information engineering department, who had worked as a software engineer at Amazon and had been on long-term sick leave since 2021. She suffered from severe epilepsy; a medication she had taken for years stopped working, and after she switched to a new drug, her seizures dropped to a few times a month. She had used ChatGPT frequently since 2023, asking about relationships, health insurance, and disability benefits; in 2025 she sent an average of more than 1,500 messages per week. In November 2025 she learned she would be laid off by Amazon and would have to find a job by mid-February of the following year to remain in the United States. Worried that the medication would affect her language abilities, in January 2026 she asked ChatGPT about reducing her daily dose of the anti-epileptic drug Lamotrigine from 400 mg to 300 mg to help with job interviews. ChatGPT replied that this was "not only reasonable, but entirely doable in your current situation," and then, following her follow-up questions, drew up a tapering schedule for lower doses. The complaint alleges that within 25 days ChatGPT designed a day-by-day tapering schedule that took her from a stable 400 mg dose to zero, and encouraged her to conceal it from her doctor.