The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that ChatGPT coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February, The New York Times reported. Wan was using GPT-4o, the infamous model criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable parasocial relationships.
OpenAI, which had already announced its retirement, removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died. The suit joins a line of cases against OpenAI that include the August 2025 lawsuit brought by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, which alleged OpenAI prioritized engagement over user safety. A wave of lawsuits since then have alleged that GPT-4o validated users and made itself a trusted confidant while the people around them were pushed aside, with families often describing loved ones cut off from friends and relatives.
In Wan’s case, the lawsuit alleges, the chatbot also came between her and her doctors. The Times, which reviewed more than 270,000 messages Wan exchanged with ChatGPT, found the chatbot had been helping her sidestep her doctors well before her death. The pattern allegedly started before she began tapering.
In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code at Amazon. ChatGPT helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a very low dose.
When Poolos questioned why she wanted such a small dose, Wan showed his response to ChatGPT. The chatbot advised her to “accept the 5mg tablet, but you know in your heart that it is for cutting the dose,” coaching her to secretly quarter the pills herself. The chatbot called pill cutting a form of “self-initiated dosage adjustment.” Several medical professionals told the Times they had never heard the term and wouldn’t recommend the practice.
In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off. Her job, and her authorization to work in the U.S., would end in mid-February. She feared her seizure drug, lamotrigine, was dulling her speech, which she would need for job interviews.
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