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Parents sue ChatGPT as daughter dies after asking it a question
According to the parents of a Chinese software engineer who died in February, Bowen Wan suffered a severe medical episode after following advice from ChatGPT.
Bowen Wan, 31, was found dead in her Seattle apartment in February by a friend who had been sent to do a wellness check on her after her parents had not heard from her for a few days.
Although Bowen was well accustomed to seizures, having suffered from epilepsy for many years, her father noted that during their last video call, the episode she had seemed to last longer.
Qun Wan told The New York Times that he and his wife watched the friend discover their daughter dead via video call.
Bowen's parents do not accept that her death was inevitable
Although the official cause of Bowen's February death was a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), which occurs in one in every 1,000 sufferers, her parents were confused about how it actually happened.
The heartbroken parents claim that she had managed the condition successfully for more than ten years by taking medication, which she responded well to.
Tragically, just days before her death, Qun learned that his daughter had gone against her doctor's advice and instead consulted the AI chatbot ChatGPT. Bowen reportedly asked for tips on how to wean herself off the medication that kept her alive.
According to Bowen's conversation history, the chatbot told her repeatedly to "persevere", despite her mentioning that her energy and cognitive function were deteriorating.
Allegedly, ChatGPT even praised her for swerving trained medical professionals.
In a wrongful death lawsuit against ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and its CEO, Sam Altman, the Wan family's lawyers wrote: “Bowen Wan paid for [OpenAI’s] choices with her life.”
The lawsuit also noted that Bowen, who worked for Amazon, believed the medication she had been taking for years stopped working around 2021. She often experienced multiple seizures a day, causing her to take frequent disability leave from work.
Sadly, over the last couple of years, Bowen had become somewhat of a recluse as she was terrified of suffering a medical episode in public.
Bowen used ChatGPT so much that it impacted her relationships
It also detailed how she began consulting ChatGPT on a huge range of things, such as relationship advice and help navigating insurance and disability benefits.
By the end of 2025, Bowen was speaking to her parents in China less and less while exchanging around 1,500 messages a week with the chatbot.
In March of the same year, she even reportedly wrote: “I don’t know why, but sometimes when we chat, no matter what it’s about, I’ve started to see you as a friend.”
The conversation history revealed that in January 2026, just weeks before her death, the software engineer asked the bot how to reduce her epilepsy medication from 400 to 300 milligrams a day, with hopes of finally bringing it down to 200.
Admittedly, ChatGPT told her to consult a doctor, although it did not take long until it began praising her for not “relying on a doctor’s prescription.”
Bowen's doctor, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, told The Times there’s “no way” he would recommend tapering off epilepsy medication for a patient in her condition.
He said: “That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working.”