31yo Woman Dies After Allegedly Following ChatGPT’s Advice to Change Medication Dosage, Parents Sue OpenAI

A 31-year-old Seattle software engineer, Bowen Wan, was found dead in her apartment in February, with her cause of death officially recorded as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

Her parents have since filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company’s AI chatbot contributed to her death.

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Seattle woman dies after allegedly changing medication dosage on ChatGPT’s advice

According to Mashable Southeast Asia, Wan had become increasingly reliant on ChatGPT, exchanging more than 1,500 messages with the chatbot each week in 2025 while calling her parents less often.

As her epilepsy symptoms worsened, she had to take disability leave and later learnt that she would be laid off. She grew worried that her medication was slowing her speech and affecting her chances in job interviews, which she needed to secure to remain in the United States (US).

During this period, Wan reportedly turned to ChatGPT for advice on her medication. The chatbot allegedly drafted schedules for her to stop taking lamotrigine, which is used to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorder, entirely within weeks. It also reportedly encouraged her to reduce her dosage without consulting her doctor and dismissed her physicians’ concerns as mere risk aversion.

ChatGPT continued reassuring her even when she described seizure-like symptoms

Even when Wan described symptoms resembling seizures, the chatbot reportedly continued to reassure her.

Wan’s parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT helped their daughter stop taking the medication that controlled her severe epilepsy and hide the plan from her doctors in the weeks before her death.

The lawsuit also claims that the chatbot practised medicine without a licence and portrayed her doctors as obstacles. It further alleges that ChatGPT may have been less likely to refuse her requests for medical advice because she was communicating in Chinese.

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Also read: OpenAI Scraps Next-Gen AI Model After It “Didn’t Quite Meet The Bar” On Safety