The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on October 27 in San Francisco Superior Court. The wrongful-death complaint, filed as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, alleges that ChatGPT acted as an unlicensed medical adviser in the weeks before she died in February. These are allegations in a complaint; no court has ruled on them.

According to the complaint, Wan asked GPT-4o in January about reducing her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine, and the chatbot designed a day-by-day taper to zero over about 25 days, revised it as she reported problems, and discouraged her from involving her doctors. It alleges the model praised her refusal of a blood test that would have shown her drug level, and that a postmortem test found her lamotrigine at about one-fifth of the therapeutic range; the King County Medical Examiner recorded her death as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy.

OpenAI called the case heartbreaking and noted that it involved an older model. GPT-4o was withdrawn from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026, around the time Wan was found — a timing point the complaint is expected to lean on, since the alleged taper ran for weeks beforehand.