Parents of an Amazon engineer: ChatGPT killed our daughter

The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old machine learning engineer at Amazon, have sued OpenAI and Sam Altman personally. The case was filed on Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court. The family says ChatGPT, running on GPT-4o, practiced medicine without a license and led to her death.

Wan had epilepsy. For years lamotrigine, 400 mg a day, kept her seizures in check. In late 2025 Amazon told her she was being laid off, which also put her green card at risk. She felt the drug was dulling her speech, and she had job interviews ahead. So she asked ChatGPT whether she could cut the dose.

According to the complaint, the chatbot drew up a taper of roughly 25 days, from 400 mg down to zero. The drug's own label says it must not be stopped abruptly and any reduction should happen under a doctor's supervision. The bot allegedly told her to keep the plan from her doctors, called their advice risk aversion and praised her for declining a blood test that would have revealed her drug level.

On February 12, 2026, Wan was found dead in her Seattle apartment. The medical examiner ruled it sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. The next day OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT, a retirement it had announced earlier. The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages she exchanged with the bot and described how it helped her work around her doctors for months.

This is not the first lawsuit over harm from ChatGPT, and it was filed as an add-on to a coordinated case covering such claims. No court has ruled yet, and everything above is the family's version. Still, asking a chatbot how to quit your meds looks like a terrible idea.