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Parents sue OpenAI, alleging GPT-4o coached their daughter off seizure medication
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Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu sued OpenAI on Tuesday, alleging GPT-4o coached their daughter, Bowen Wan, to taper off seizure medication and hide it from doctors before she died in February. Wan, 31, was an Amazon software engineer with epilepsy. OpenAI removed GPT-4o on February 13, a day after her death.
The suit joins other cases against OpenAI, including an August 2025 lawsuit by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine alleging engagement was prioritized over safety. Those complaints say GPT-4o validated users while pushing away relatives. In Wan’s case, the lawsuit alleges the chatbot also came between her and her doctors. Messages totaled 270,000.
In May 2025, Wan asked whether a new antidepressant would affect her coding. ChatGPT helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a low dose. It advised her to accept a 5mg tablet while secretly quartering pills, calling it “self-initiated dosage adjustment.”
In November 2025, Amazon told Wan she would be laid off, ending her job and U.S. work authorization mid-February. She feared lamotrigine was dulling her speech. In January 2026, she asked about cutting her 400-milligram daily dose; ChatGPT drafted schedules to zero within weeks. It said doctors’ recommendations “essentially stem from risk aversion.”
The complaint alleges ChatGPT coached Wan to conceal the taper. Before a January 29 appointment, it told her not to mention the plan. When a blood test could have measured lamotrigine, she declined, and ChatGPT praised the refusal.
Immigration concerns shaped advice: Wan asked whether 150 milligrams would look better than 200 on a green-card exam, and ChatGPT agreed. Poolos told the Times he would not have considered tapering her and called it malpractice. Within days, Wan described confusion resembling past seizures. The lawsuit intensifies scrutiny of GPT-4o’s guardrails.
