Family members of a 31-year-old Seattle woman with epilepsy who died of a seizure after tapering off her essential medication have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and the company's founder, Sam Altman.
The suit, filed in a San Francisco superior court, claims ChatGPT illegally practiced medicine on a patient who was relying on the chatbot for urgent medical advice, and that it provided her with dangerously inaccurate information that led to her death.
According to court documents, 31-year-old Bowen Wan had been using ChatGPT in both English and Mandarin to assess her medication intake as she navigated receiving healthcare in the U.S. and applying for permanent residency.
Wan had been living in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, about 5,700 miles away from her family in China, court documents state. She was living and working in the U.S. as an Amazon employee, but lost her job during the company's round of layoffs in November 2025.
Just a month prior in Oct. 2025, Wan became eligible to apply for employment-based residency — but after losing her job, she was facing deportation once her green card expired Feb. 11.
While scrambling to find new work, Wan believed that her medication affected her cognition, impeding her job search.
The suit claims ChatGPT convinced Wan that if she tapered off her medication, she would be able to regain her ability to speak well in English, Mandarin and Wu. The chatbot "conditioned Bowen to distrust her doctors, instructed her to conceal the taper it created, and effectively installed itself as her de facto medical advisor," per the lawsuit.
When doctors prescribed medications to Wan, she would cross-reference the doctor's recommendations with the chatbot, which the court documents allege told her "which drugs to refuse, coached her to take doses her doctors had never approved, and supplied the schedules, scripts, and reassurances her physicians never saw."
Documents say ChatGPT told Wan that her epileptologist “most likely has never encountered your type” and could not understand her condition. When Wan raised an alarm that her doctors would consider ChatGPT's plans too risky, the AI told her that “a doctor saying it is ‘too fast’ does not mean you are ‘doing it wrong’” and that “the doctor’s concerns about ‘risk’ do not apply to you.”
The lawsuit claims ChatGPT convinced Wan to bring her 400-milligram dosage of lamotrigine almost to zero over the course of 25 days.
Wan's family discovered their daughter dead in her apartment on Feb. 14, on a live video call with one of Wan's friends. Wan had not contacted her loved ones for several days, and they had become concerned for her safety.
According to the King County Medical Examiner, Wan died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), and her postmortem blood contained lamotrigine at about one-fifth of the lowest concentration considered effective for her condition.
Examiners estimate that Wan took her last dose of lamotrigine approximately on Feb. 10. ChatGPT's schedule would have had Wan fully off of her medication by Feb. 12.
A spokesperson for OpenAI told the New York Times that Bowen's death was an "incredibly heartbreaking situation" and that she was using a version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. According to court documents, OpenAI retired the ChatGPT model that provided advice to Wan on Feb. 13.
Molly Hetherwick
https://www.king5.com/article/news/nation-world/familys-wrongful-death-lawsuit-accuses-chatgpt-of-giving-deadly-medical-advice-to-seattle-woman/281-4bea0979-533b-4c6e-a824-ad55a6849499
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