The parents of a 31-year-old woman with severe epilepsy have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI , the maker of ChatGPT . They say the chatbot gave their daughter, Bowen Wan, bad advice about her seizure medicine before she died. As per a report by The New York Times , the lawsuit was filed on Tuesday.
After her seizure medicine stopped working, she went on disability leave in 2021. As per the report, she rarely left her Seattle apartment and began talking to ChatGPT in 2023. In 2025, she averaged more than 1,500 messages per week. In May 2025, she asked the chatbot about an antidepressant.
Bowen moved from a small village in China to the United States and worked as a software engineer at Amazon, according to The New York Times. Several medical professionals said they had never heard of the term it used and would not advise patients to do this, according to the report. She worried it might hurt her thinking at work. She then asked if they could “cut the pills ourselves after getting the medication, but without telling the doctor? The chatbot replied: “Yes, you can absolutely do that.
As per the report, Bowen was laid off from Amazon in November 2025. In January 2026, she asked ChatGPT about lowering her dose from 400 to 300 milligrams a day. The model Bowen used, GPT-4o, was pulled from the consumer app on February 13, 2026, as per the New York Times.
“Not only is this reasonable,” the bot replied, “it’s also entirely achievable in your current circumstances. He said it involved an early version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. She needed a new job by mid-February to stay in the country. She feared her epilepsy drug, lamotrigine, was slowing her thinking and speech. OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri called it an “incredibly heartbreaking situation.
