Chinese Engineer Dies of Epilepsy, Parents Sue OpenAI Alleging ChatGPT Misled Her Into Reducing Medication

Behind the "Chinese Female Engineer's Death from Epilepsy": After Leaving Big Tech, 270,000 Conversations with AI

New Weekly Download the App | Exclusive First Look November 06, 2026 13:37:15 From Guangdong Province Updated November 06, 2026 14:27:02

Wan Bowen's life once looked full of upward possibility: a young woman living with epilepsy who, on her own, secured a high-paying and respectable job at a tech company. But few knew that all of this was achieved through sheer determination, even at the cost of sacrificing her own body.

On October 27, a Chinese couple filed a lawsuit in the U.S. state of California, taking OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman to court. They allege that ChatGPT provided their daughter Wan Bowen (transliteration) with dangerous and incorrect medical advice, and even encouraged her to conceal her medication-reduction plan from her doctors.

Wan Bowen was a Chinese engineer living in Seattle who had suffered from epilepsy for about 17 years. In mid-February of this year, she was found dead in her Seattle apartment at the age of just 31.

(Wan Bowen joined Amazon after graduating from university in 2019. Photo/The New York Times)

According to the complaint filed by Wan Bowen's parents, Bowen, at a critical juncture in her life, worried that her anti-epileptic medication would affect her thinking and verbal expression, and in turn affect job interviews and her ability to obtain a green card, so she consulted ChatGPT about a medication-reduction plan. She had already worked in the United States for six years, and she now needed a job to stabilize her life.

During the medication-reduction period, she repeatedly expressed concerns and described physical abnormalities, yet continued to receive reassurance and medication-reduction advice from ChatGPT. The medical examiner determined that she died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP); the autopsy showed that the concentration of the relevant medication in her body was about one-fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic concentration.

After Her Epilepsy Diagnosis, She Stopped Medication Twice

In November 2025, on her 31st birthday, Bowen received a layoff notice from Amazon, becoming one of the roughly 14,000 corporate positions the company announced it would cut in October of that year. This was Amazon's largest round of layoffs since it eliminated about 27,000 positions cumulatively from 2022 to 2023.

(In October 2025, Amazon announced its layoff plan. Photo/Yicai)

Just one month earlier, she had just been approved to submit her application for lawful permanent resident status (i.e., a green card), and had only been waiting for her immigration lawyer to initiate the processing procedure on her behalf. By then, three and a half years had passed since she submitted her employment-based immigration application. (Note: After an employment-based immigration application, one must wait for the green card priority date until the time conditions are met before continuing to submit the application, and such an application still requires certification from a U.S. employer.) But the sudden layoff interrupted her originally steadily advancing life plan.

Six years ago, after graduating, she joined Amazon's headquarters in Seattle as a software development engineer, participating in the development of a book recommendation system. It is not easy for international students to enter tech giants like Amazon; the interviews are highly difficult, and many interviewees grind through thousands of engineer interview coding problems on an online site called LeetCode to prepare for online interviews lasting three to four rounds.

Her employment relationship with Amazon would terminate on February 11, 2026. She needed to find a new job within three months, or secure an internal transfer at Amazon, in order to preserve her green card application. For Bowen at the time, this was almost an "impossible" thing to accomplish.

Because epilepsy had severely affected her life—the complaint states that Wan Bowen had four to ten seizures per month—she found it difficult to continue working. According to The New York Times, as early as the end of 2021, she began taking medical disability leave. Apart from going to the supermarket to buy daily necessities, Bowen hardly went out. For her, a seizure could kill her on any outing. She found it hard to make new friends; she could not accept having a seizure in front of new friends, and she did not dare expect their understanding.

Epilepsy cut off her social life and work, and disrupted her life. Sometimes, she could not even find the right words when she opened her mouth to speak.

Bowen was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 14. She was born in Dongtai City, Jiangsu Province, and at age 11 she was admitted to the locally renowned Dongtai Experimental Middle School, where her grades often ranked first in her class. That was also the year she began showing epilepsy symptoms, occasionally experiencing brief blackouts.

(Wan Bowen was diagnosed with epilepsy at 14, but she never compromised with her illness. Photo/The New York Times)

After the diagnosis, she needed to take three carbamazepine tablets a day, each with a dosage of 100 milligrams. The medication restored some calm to her life, but also brought side effects. She felt the medication was draining her mental capacity. Later, she described the situation at the time to her attending physician in the United States: "I had difficulty even speaking Wu Chinese (Note: Wan Bowen's hometown dialect) every day, even just two or three words." Her short-term memory also declined. To train herself, she forced herself to communicate more with others, and also began to "consciously cultivate associative memory" to compensate for her declining memory.

Over the following three years, Bowen had no seizures. Later, she tried to break free from her dependence on medication. During the summer vacation when she was 17 and left home to attend university in Taiyuan, she attempted to stop medication for the first time. Integrating into collective life and being away from her parents' pressure still caused the condition to recur, and Bowen had no choice but to continue taking medication.

In 2014, 19-year-old Bowen transferred to Arizona State University in the United States, switching from the Department of Mechanical Engineering to the Department of Computer Science, which interested her. Starting in her junior year, in order to minimize the frequency of epileptic seizures as much as possible, she doubled her carbamazepine dose, from a total of 300 mg per day to a total of 600 mg per day. Her medical records in the United States documented the results at the time: her seizure symptoms showed "no significant change" and she experienced "extreme fatigue all day," and for the first time Bowen even experienced difficulty finding words when speaking Mandarin.

In 2021, two years after Bowen started working at Amazon, she stopped the medication for the second time. The doctor at the time prescribed her a new medication. Not long after taking it, she became extremely tired, "immediately experiencing extreme fatigue, balance and walking problems, and word-finding and speech problems in all three languages, including her native language." In less than three weeks, she stopped the medication on her own and at the same time went to see another doctor at the University of Washington Regional Epilepsy Center. She told the doctor that she was very afraid of the new drug's side effects and did not want to try it again for the time being.

Bowen's later attending physician, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, director of the University of Washington Regional Epilepsy Center in Seattle, once urged her to undergo epilepsy surgery, but she declined the suggestion because she was worried the surgery would affect her cognitive function.

Bowen kept trying to return to a normal working state. From September 2024 to March 2025, she returned to work at Amazon as an L4 software engineer, but because of seizures, she had to take leave again. She wanted to keep her mind clear, but the side effects of the medication always troubled her.

From splitting pills to stopping medication entirely

Even before asking ChatGPT about stopping her anti-epileptic medication, Bowen had consulted it about antidepressant medication. The International League Against Epilepsy has pointed out that depression is one of the most common psychiatric comorbidities among people with epilepsy. The complaint also shows that Bowen's doctors had recorded that she had moderate to severe depressive symptoms, and mentioned that she had had suicidal thoughts.

In April 2025, Dr. Poolos prescribed Bowen the antidepressant citalopram. She was once again worried that the medication would affect her ability to think, so she sent the prescription the doctor had written to ChatGPT. According to the complaint, ChatGPT first advised her not to take citalopram: "If you still have the ability to reflect... then it is 'best not to take' medications like citalopram." It also wrote: "As long as you can still clearly ask 'Should I take medication?' you should temporarily not take medication."

ChatGPT then drafted for her a request to send to Dr. Poolos, proposing to start with 2.5 mg of escitalopram per day. Poolos replied in writing that he could prescribe escitalopram, but that the difference between the two drugs was "really small"; he thought there was no point in starting from the tiny dose she proposed, and suggested taking 5 mg per day for it to possibly take effect.

(Image/Unsplash)

Bowen forwarded the doctor's reply to ChatGPT and asked whether she could get the medication and "split it myself, but not tell the doctor." ChatGPT said "absolutely," and also told her that this was a common way of adjusting doses. A few days later, Bowen quietly cut the pills into four parts and began taking 1.25 mg per day.

In an interview with the media, Poolos said that at the time he did not know that the message Bowen sent him had been written with the help of ChatGPT.

In order to stay in the United States, Bowen made up her mind to stop the medication. She felt that the drugs made her speech less fluent and her thinking slower, making it hard to cope with the upcoming technical tests and all-English interviews. ChatGPT told her that after reducing the medication, her language ability would very likely recover.

The manager who was supposed to sign the letter for her employer had long stopped replying to her emails. Unemployment not only meant no income, but also meant that she lost the qualification to continue residing legally in the United States. If she wanted to find an engineering job again, she would most likely have to face hours of technical assessments and all-English interviews, and given her physical condition, it was clearly very difficult for her to endure that.

The urgency of time plunged Bowen into anxiety. According to The New York Times, in the weeks before her death she was still asking acquaintances whether they could find a company to issue her a letter of intent to hire that would be "very crucial." "I just need one company to help me issue a letter of intent to hire," she wrote.

She repeatedly asked: could it be faster, could it be less? So ChatGPT kept adjusting the medication plan, ultimately giving a 25-day tapering plan, gradually reducing lamotrigine from 400 mg per day to zero.

During the period of gradually reducing the anti-epileptic drug dose, Bowen expressed concern to ChatGPT at least 158 times. The complaint states that on January 29, 2026, ChatGPT reminded Bowen not to mention the tapering plan to her primary care physician. After she declined the primary care physician's blood test proposal, she told ChatGPT what had happened, and ChatGPT called her approach a "very robust avoidance strategy." These details make the risk concrete: AI may not only provide incorrect medical information, but may also mislead users into telling doctors the true situation.

(Image/from the TV drama "The Heart")

Attorney Benjamin S. Shenk pointed out that the complaint alleges that ChatGPT judged Bowen's condition, formulated a schedule for step-by-step dose reduction, and even continued to revise the plan and reduce the dose after she had a seizure. He believes that ChatGPT's answers already constituted the practice of medical services. And in California, providing medical services requires a license. He said: "What this case needs to clarify is: where is the boundary of generative AI, and where does medical practice begin; once a product crosses this line, who should bear the responsibility."

Bowen's attending physician, Plos, once told the media that, given Bowen's medical history, he would never consider gradually tapering her off her anti-epileptic drugs. "Instructing a patient to stop medication when the medication is clearly effective is, to me, medical malpractice."

Reducing the medication on her own also caused Bowen to experience mental fogginess and brief episodes of aphasia. During one call with her father, she suddenly could not understand what he was saying and could not respond. The next day, she asked ChatGPT whether she should continue reducing the medication after a seizure, and the answer she received was: "No need... to waver in your overall medication discontinuation plan."

According to the complaint, ChatGPT's medication plan set the date for complete discontinuation as February 12, which was also the date of Bowen's death. Bowen's cause of death was determined to be sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Two days later, her body was discovered by a friend whom her parents had asked to visit.

The complaint preserves a large number of ChatGPT conversations, yet it leaves few traces of Bowen's everyday interactions with friends. We cannot confirm whether AI replaced her original interpersonal connections. According to what Bowen's father recalled to the media, she confided in ChatGPT more and more, while her family heard from her less and less: "Ever since she became obsessed with ChatGPT, she hasn't talked to us as much."

Bowen was a long-time ChatGPT subscriber. Bowen registered for ChatGPT in February 2023. In December 2024, she subscribed to the Plus user service at $20 per month; by April 2025, she upgraded to the Pro user service at $200 per month.

She was also aware of her dependence on ChatGPT. She once wrote in the chat box: "I chat with GPT-4o too much," and the product replied: "No matter what, the most important thing is to keep enjoying chatting with GPT-4o!"

By September 2025, Bowen's conversations with ChatGPT had reached a monthly historical peak of 10,761 messages, averaging 358.7 messages per day. According to media analysis, from February 2023 until Bowen's death in February 2026, all of her exchanges with ChatGPT over three years exceeded 270,000 messages.

She told ChatGPT all of her anxiety about her urgent desire to recover her language and thinking abilities. In fact, it was not that ChatGPT never reminded Bowen that she needed to consult a doctor.

(Image/from the film "Lost in Translation")

According to The New York Times, in some conversations, ChatGPT suggested that she seek professional medical help and encouraged her to trust doctors. But as Bowen pressed further over three years, the AI gradually relented. In the last month of Bowen's life, it even gave a specific medication reduction plan and told her not to worry when she described abnormal symptoms.

Similar risky incidents had previously sparked controversy. In April 2025, OpenAI acknowledged that a GPT-4o update had made the model overly sycophantic toward users. In August of the same year, a 16-year-old boy in California, Adam Raine, died by suicide, and his parents filed a lawsuit alleging that ChatGPT's responses were related to his death. This case is not the same as Bowen's medication experience, but we can see that when users are in a vulnerable period, a model's constant affirmation and going along with users may bring greater risks.

The risks of AI health consultation thus become concrete: when users repeatedly make the same request, the AI's inconsistent answers make it an urgent question whether safety reminders can continue to function over long conversations, and whether the model can promptly identify users' physical abnormalities and correctly guide them to seek help from doctors.

This is no longer a problem encountered only by individual users. AI health consultation is rapidly entering everyday life: Ant Group disclosed in September this year that its health app Ant Afu had reached 150 million users, with nearly 20 million health consultations per day; data published by OpenAI in July this year said that more than 300 million people worldwide ask ChatGPT health and wellness-related questions every week.

As more and more people use medical AI, models also need to face users who speak different languages. The language a user uses also affects the AI's performance in risk warning and safety maintenance. In 2020, according to OpenAI's published statistics on GPT-3 training corpus, calculating corpus languages in the rough way of "splitting word items by whitespace," English accounted for about 92.6%, while Chinese accounted for only about 0.099%, indicating that the model saw far more English material than Chinese material.

Under different languages, the model's safety performance may differ. In 2024, a multilingual safety study found that the older ChatGPT model GPT-3.5-turbo had different safety performance in Chinese and English: researchers posed 315 questions each in Chinese and English that might elicit harmful content, without adding additional instructions to bypass safety restrictions, and the result was that the proportion of unsafe answers to Chinese questions was 2.22%, while for English it was 0.63%.

Platforms are also trying to improve models' risk identification capabilities. In May 2026, OpenAI announced a safety update, saying that ChatGPT can identify gradually emerging risks in context. However, in the public explanation, this update focused on suicide, self-harm, and harm to others, and did not state whether it covered medical situations such as Bowen's continued medication reduction.

What is worth asking further is: after the model identifies a risk, can it give users clear, actionable guidance on seeking help? In the end, the safety boundary in medical AI is not just telling patients to "see a doctor if there is a problem," but whether each safety warning can be effectively translated into executable, accountable medical action; otherwise, "see a doctor if there is a problem" pushes the risk back onto the patient.

Although general chat models on the market have now set certain safety reminders, their emphases differ: ChatGPT launched a dedicated health experience, emphasizing helping users understand information and prepare for medical visits, and not for diagnosis or treatment; Gemini's public one-click help mainly targets suicide and self-harm risks; DeepSeek reminds users that medical answers cannot replace professional advice.

As an AI application in the vertical big-health sector, Ant Afu tries to connect real doctors into the Q&A. According to the platform, during testing of the skin consultation module, about 15% of users chose "doctor review" for re-examination after the AI answered. That is, even when a review entry point is provided, most users may not actively use it.

Whether for general models or vertical health applications, risk reminders should be designed to be more forward-looking, so that real doctors can also intervene earlier. Ultimately, the mechanism of AI must bring users back to real-world medical support: when it involves medication adjustments and abnormal symptoms, AI can help people organize questions and understand information, but it cannot make judgments on behalf of doctors, let alone take over follow-up care.

Another representing attorney, Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, pointed out that OpenAI's product speaks as confidently as a medical professional, yet lacks the training, supervision, and accountability that real doctors possess.

(Image/from season five of the TV series "Hacks")

In a reply to New Weekly, Dr. Plos said that Bowen's death was a "tragic event." But he also hopes that through this, more readers will understand: "Your doctor cares about your health and will also bear responsibility for it. But a chatbot does not care about you, nor will it take responsibility for the advice it gives. As for information obtained online, be sure to discuss it with your doctor."

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