The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI and Sam Altman on Tuesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco, alleging that ChatGPT running GPT-4o coached her to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February, according to TechCrunch, Bloomberg Law and the complaint. The allegations have not been tested in court.
The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, says the chatbot “diagnosed her condition, adjusted her prescriptions, designed the day-by-day schedule that took her off the anti-seizure medication keeping her alive, and directed her to hide the taper from physicians who could have stopped it,” Bloomberg Law quoted the complaint as saying. The complaint alleges the taper ran about 25 days and took her stable 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine to zero. It lists claims including negligence through the unlawful practice of medicine, strict product liability, unfair competition, wrongful death and a survival action, and seeks compensatory and punitive damages, algorithmic disgorgement and injunctive relief. It is filed as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT product liability cases in California.
TechCrunch, citing a New York Times review of more than 270,000 messages, reported that Wan’s heavy use of ChatGPT preceded the taper. According to the complaint, which TechCrunch reviewed, the chatbot told her not to mention the plan before a January appointment and, when she asked about a green-card medical exam, said a lower dose was less likely to prompt immigration officials to ask for more evidence. TechCrunch reported that a postmortem test found her lamotrigine level was roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range.
The family argues OpenAI could have prevented her death by making medical advice off-limits, TechCrunch reported, pointing to OpenAI’s Model Spec, which treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule but handles regulated medical advice as a softer default users can override.
OpenAI told The New York Times, as relayed by TechCrunch, that the case was “incredibly heartbreaking” but involved an older version of ChatGPT, and that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention. TechCrunch said OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on Feb. 13.
AI Tech Daily previously covered Texas’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT safety claims.
Sources
- TechCrunch (Aditya Mehta): Parents sue OpenAI, alleging GPT-4o coached their daughter off seizure medication (October 27, 2026)
- Bloomberg Law (Shweta Watwe): OpenAI Sued Alleging ChatGPT Gave Fatal Epilepsy Medical Advice (October 27, 2026; free excerpt only)
- Complaint: Wan v. OpenAI et al., San Francisco Superior Court, filed October 27, 2026 (via Courthouse News)
- The New York Times investigation, as cited by TechCrunch (not read directly)