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.
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.