OpenAI has once again landed in legal trouble because of its GPT-4o model that the company retired. The parents of a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer have taken the Sam Altman-led firm to court, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged their daughter to reduce her seizure medication without medical supervision and hide the changes from her doctors, according to The New York Times.
The engineer, Bowen Wan, died in February this year and had epilepsy. This lawsuit claims that the AI platform repeatedly assured her about symptoms she experienced while reducing her medication.
How ChatGPT Helped Wan Change Her Medication
As per the report from The New York Times, which reviewed more than 2,70,000 messages exchanged between Wan and ChatGPT, the conversations about her medication started well before she started reducing her seizure drug.
The lawsuit has been filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, who claim that ChatGPT helped their daughter create a plan to reduce her daily dose of lamotrigine, a medicine used to control seizures. In January 2026, Wan reportedly asked the chatbot about reducing her 400mg daily dose because she feared the medication was affecting her speech and could hurt her chances in job interviews. Amazon had allegedly informed her in November 2025 that she would be laid off, with her employment and US work authorisation ending in mid-February.
This report notes that ChatGPT created schedules that would have reduced her medication to zero within weeks. It reportedly advised her not to tell her doctors about the plan and praised her decision to allegedly refuse a blood test that may have revealed unstable medication levels.
The chatbot allegedly presented these symptoms as part of her brain adjusting to the lower dose. The newspaper counted at least 158 instances in which Wan expressed concern about reducing her medication. In her final conversation on February 11, Wan asked whether her head pain resembled pain caused by a fever. According to the complaint, ChatGPT told her the pain was “not dangerous” and described it as part of recovery.
Wan’s family argues that OpenAI should impose stricter restrictions on medical advice. The company told The New York Times that the case was “incredibly heartbreaking” but involved an older ChatGPT model. It added that newer models are better at recognising situations requiring urgent attention.
