Woman dies after ChatGPT convinced her to change medication dosage | Latest Tech News
Bowen Wan was on the telephone with her father when she abruptly stopped talking.
She appeared to have a seizure — one thing she’d struggled with for years — but this one appeared to last longer than regular, her dad seen. When she got here to, she said she’d discuss more later, after she’d rested.
Days later, she stopped responding to calls. Her mother and father, who live in China, organized to have somebody verify on her, according to a bombshell new report from The New York Times, based on a lawsuit filed by Wan’s household.
Qun Wan and his spouse said they watched via video call as a good friend discovered the 31-year-old software program engineer lifeless in her Seattle house.
Bowen Wan, 31, was discovered lifeless from problems from epilepsy.
Her mother and father couldn’t perceive what had occurred. The official trigger of Wan’s February death was a complication of epilepsy — a condition she had managed efficiently for over a decade.
Epilepsy is way from uncommon, affecting 1 in 26 people during their lifetime. The most severe complication is sudden sudden death in epilepsy (SUDEP), which Wan suffered. One in every 1,000 adults with epilepsy dies from SUDEP.
It often happens at evening or during sleep, and the individual is incessantly discovered laying facedown, as Wan was. The best manner to forestall SUDEP is to control and cut back seizures, which Qun Wan thought his daughter had been doing with medication.
Qun Wan said he later found that in the times and hours before her death, his daughter consulted ChatGPT for advice on how to dodge her doctor’s watchful safety and taper off her life-sustaining medication.
Despite her voicing issues about her deteriorating vitality and cognition, the chatbot reportedly told Bowen Wan repeatedly to “persevere” and praised her for going around medical professionals.
“Bowen Wan paid for [OpenAI’s] choices with her life,” the household’s legal professionals wrote in Tuesday’s wrongful death lawsuit against ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and its CEO, Sam Altman.
A growing relationship with ChatGPT
Those common telephone calls with her household had been one of the only methods Bowen Wan was ready to keep in contact after she moved to the US.
In 2021, she grew to become even more remoted. The medication she had been on for years had inexplicably stopped working. Sometimes, seizures would strike more than once a day.
Wan subsequently took incapacity go away from her software program engineering job at Amazon, The Times reported.
Wan began confiding in ChatGPT after going on medical go away from her job at Amazon.
She not often left her house for groceries, let alone going out to socialize. She didn’t need to risk having a seizure in public, which might be harmful and embarrassing.
In 2023, she began speaking to ChatGPT for relationship advice and help navigating insurance coverage and incapacity advantages. By 2025, she averaged 1,500 messages a week with the bot and began speaking to her mother and father less, they said.
“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,” Wan wrote to ChatGPT in March 2025.
In November 2025, she was laid off at Amazon. She’d have to get a new job by mid-February to keep in the US, which might require hours-long technical evaluations and interviews performed in English, The Times reported.
Bowen Wan with her mother and father, Meiqin Xu, left, and Qun Wan, proper.
At this level, her health had been bettering on a new drug that cut her seizures down to just a few a month but was fearful that the drug’s results on her pondering and speech would get in the best way of the brainpower needed to get her next job.
Cutting down “might help recover my language ability a bit for job interviews,” she told ChatGPT.
A lethal medication change
Qun Wan said his daughter had modified her medication on her own before because she didn’t just like the unintended effects or didn’t really feel prefer it was working as it ought to.
Chat logs with ChatGPT revealed that before she was laid off, she’d requested for advice on whether or not she ought to regulate an antidepressant dose and workshopped messages to her doctor to ask for the change. The bot inspired her to cut it on her own without telling her doctor, the lawsuit said.
In January 2026, she requested for advice on lowering her epilepsy medication from 400 to 300 milligrams a day, then to 200. While at first ChatGPT told her to seek the advice of a doctor, it in the end praised her for not “relying on a doctor’s prescription,” The Times reported.
ChatGPT says that the model that Wan used, GPT-4o, is no longer obtainable. Blossom Stock Studio – stock.adobe.com
Her epilepsy doctor, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, said there’s “no way” he’d suggest really fizzling out epilepsy medication for a affected person like Wan. “That would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it’s clearly working,” he told The Times.
Qun Wan discovered that ChatGPT had made a plan to decrease 400 mg to none in a matter of weeks.
As his daughter lowered her dose, she began experiencing symptoms — confusion, not remembering how she obtained to mattress — and voiced issues a whole of 158 instances while ChatGPT brushed it off as the mind in “low-power mode.” “You have absolutely no need to worry,” the bot said.
Her last message was despatched three days before her physique was discovered.
Bowen’s household sues OpenAI
The Wan household said that ChatGPT practiced medication without a license and framed docs “as obstacles to manage, rather than authorities to consult.”
It’s an “incredibly heartbreaking situation,” Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, told The Times.
Pusateri emphasised that the model (GPT-4o) that Wan used is no longer obtainable after it was criticized for being overly agreeable and serving to facilitate suicide.
“While ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care, we believe A.I. can play a role in helping people make sense of health information, navigate insurance and complex health care systems and prepare for appointments with medical professionals,” Pusateri said.
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