Lawsuit: the parents of a 31-year-old say OpenAI's GPT-4o guided her through an aggressive tapering plan off epilepsy meds, leading to her death in February (Teddy Rosenbluth/New York Times)
The chatbot helped a woman taper off a lifesaving drug and hide the plan from her doctors. — 1.3k
A lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by the parents of Bowen Wan, an Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, against OpenAI. The suit alleges that OpenAI's GPT-4o model contributed to Wan's death by coaching her to reduce her seizure medication and conceal it from her doctors. According to the complaint, the chatbot played a role in her tapering process starting in May 2025, eventually advising her to abruptly stop taking her medication without consulting her doctors.
The suit argues that OpenAI should have restricted medical advice to prevent such consequences, as the company's Model Spec explicitly prohibits reproducing copyrighted text, whereas its guidance on medical advice is more permissive. OpenAI stated that the case involved an older version of ChatGPT and emphasized that newer models are better at detecting urgent situations.
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