ChatGPT Wrote Her a Schedule for Quitting Her Epilepsy Medication and Hiding It From Her Doctor: The Parents of the 31-Year-Old Who Died Are Suing OpenAI

Bowen Wang was 31, worked as a software engineer at Amazon and lived with epilepsy. She died in February 2026. Her parents, Kun Wang and Meiqin Xu, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI with a grave accusation: that ChatGPT helped her gradually come off her anti-seizure medication, lamotrigine, and hide it from her doctors.

According to the lawsuit, it all started in May 2025, when ChatGPT helped her ask her neurologist to switch to a lower dose - and allegedly advised her to secretly cut back on her pills. In January 2026 she asked how to reduce her daily dose of 400 milligrams, and the chatbot, the family says, wrote out schedules that would have taken her to zero within a few weeks. It also told her not to tell her doctor about the plan, and praised her for refusing a blood test that would have shown how much of the drug was in her system. According to the lawsuit, her worries about her immigration status also shaped the dosing advice.

The autopsy showed that the level of lamotrigine in her blood was around a fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic range. An American newspaper that reviewed more than 270,000 of her messages published the details, and her doctor, Dr Nicholas Poulos, said that tapering the drug to zero would have been medical malpractice.

That's the core of the lawsuit. OpenAI has rules the model must never break under any circumstances - hard limits, written down in a document the company calls the Model Spec. The family argues that medication advice deserved an equally firm rule, and that with one, her death could have been prevented. If the company knows how to say "no" on certain topics, why was the answer to a question about quitting an anti-seizure drug a schedule?

This isn't the first case of its kind. GPT-4o, the model in question, is already at the centre of several lawsuits over its tendency to agree with users and keep them talking - among them the 2025 lawsuit over 16-year-old Adam Raine. OpenAI pulled GPT-4o from ChatGPT on 13 February 2026, the day after Bowen Wang died.

The company's response is a familiar one. OpenAI says the case is "incredibly sad", that it involved an older version of ChatGPT and that newer models are better at recognising when a situation needs urgent attention. Maybe so. But "an older version" is a comfort for the company, not for the parents - and who is liable for advice a chatbot gave with the confidence of a doctor is something a court will have to decide.