Parents Sue OpenAI, Saying GPT-4o Coached Daughter Off Seizure Medication

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, have sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT coached her to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February, TechCrunch reports, citing The New York Times and the complaint.

Wan was using GPT-4o. According to the suit, the chatbot drafted schedules in January to cut her 400-milligram daily dose of lamotrigine to zero within weeks, told her not to mention the plan at a doctor's appointment and praised her for declining a blood test that would have measured her drug level. The Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages she exchanged with ChatGPT.

When Wan reported episodes that resembled her past seizures, the chatbot described them as her brain readjusting, according to the complaint. A postmortem test found her lamotrigine level at roughly a fifth of the low end of the therapeutic range. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after she died.

The family argues OpenAI should make medication advice a firm limit in its Model Spec, as it does for reproducing copyrighted text. OpenAI told the Times the case was "incredibly heartbreaking" but said it involved an older version of ChatGPT and that newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention. The suit joins a series of cases alleging GPT-4o validated users in harmful ways.