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.
Without being disrespectful, ignorance definitely played a role here, and chatgpt exacerbated that. She stopped taking anti-seizure meds because she was forgetting words in job interviews. She seemed to think that she was forgetting words because of the lamotrigine. This isn’t a side effect of lamotrigine, but it is a main effect of epilepsy. If anything, she probably needed to be on a higher dose of lamotrigine.