Bowen Wan’s family has filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT’s parent company, claiming the bot told her to taper off her epilepsy medication, which led to her death
The family of a woman who died after she stopped taking her epilepsy medication has filed a lawsuit against an AI company they claim encouraged her to taper off taking the lifesaving drug.
Bowen Wan began messaging ChatGPT in February 2023, finding companionship in the AI bot, The New York Times reports. She was 28 and living in Seattle, far from her native rural Chinese village, Jiangsu. She asked the chatbot for medical advice after her severe epilepsy led to disability leave from her software job at Amazon.
When she was then laid off in November 2025, Wan began searching for a new job so she could maintain her green card — but was concerned that the side effects of her epilepsy medication, lamotrigine, might impact her ability to work. The lawsuit claims ChatGPT advised her to taper off taking the lamotrigine.
They certainly had some way to find out she’s dead…
what do you expect them to be able to do anyway? you think her rural Chinese family has a back-channel to the bigwigs in the US pharma industry? or maybe their neighbors run a lamotrigine farm?
They might be able to tell her to get off of the fucking internet and to not kill herself…
you think the issue is she simply hadn’t considered not dying? either she lowers the dose to try to make it last until she figures something out, or she doesn’t lower the dose and she runs out and can’t get more. the core problem is she needs medicine and has no way to get it, how is her family supposed to solve that for her?
god you’re a fucking moron
That’s absolutely not what happened. Nothing to do with access to health care or cost of medicine.
She was losing her ability to speak and attributed that to a side effect of the medication. An AI told her to stop taking it so she did.
You’re saying the right words. Now re-read until you understand what you said.
When you understand what you said, you’ll agree with me that ChatGPT has nothing to do with it and that this lawsuit is bullshit.
Are you being paid by OpenAI to astroturf or something? Or do you really just enjoy the taste of the boot?
No, I just really dislike stupid people who can’t understand such simple concepts. Once again, for the stupid people, AI has nothing to do with the situation. The person in question could have just as easily have read a bumper sticker and decided the universe was talking to them.
No your being ridiculous, a corporation made software and tells people to use it for exactly this, life advice, counciling, things it absolutely shouldn’t be used for, and there’s no warning ‘hay this is a word generator with no intelligence or ability to grasp it’s giving dangerous advice to people with life threatening problems’ the people making the software should very clearly be made accountable. your need to defend corporations and blame a dead woman isn’t logical.
People should quit believing everything they see/read. They should also go to a doctor to get their medical advice instead of to some friend group or internet search.