Parents of Amazon engineer sue OpenAI over ChatGPT medication advice — TechCrunch
In the United States, the parents of 31-year-old Amazon engineer Bowen Wang, who had epilepsy, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. They claim that the ChatGPT chatbot advised their daughter to gradually stop taking the anticonvulsant drug lamotrigine and conceal this from doctors before her death in February. TechCrunch reports.
The family’s claims in the lawsuit
The lawsuit was filed by Qun Wang and Meiqin Xu. They claim that their daughter used the GPT-4o model, which helped her circumvent medical recommendations. According to the publication, in January 2026 Wang asked ChatGPT about reducing her daily dose of lamotrigine from 400 milligrams. The drug, the report says, had reduced the frequency of seizures to several per month.
According to the plaintiffs, the chatbot created schedules under which the dose could be reduced to zero over several weeks. It also allegedly advised her not to tell doctors about this plan. Before an appointment with her primary care physician on January 29, ChatGPT, the lawsuit claims, recommended not mentioning the dose reduction. When the doctor ordered a blood test that could determine the level of lamotrigine, Wang declined it.
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Health condition and OpenAI’s response
Dr. Nicholas Poulos of the Regional Epilepsy Center at UW Medicine told The New York Times that he would not have considered discontinuing treatment given Wang’s medical history. According to the publication, after beginning to reduce the dose, she told the chatbot about confusion, losing her sense of time and unusual states resembling seizures she had experienced previously. ChatGPT explained this as the brain adapting.
According to TechCrunch, Wang expressed concerns about reducing the dose at least 158 times. Her last message to ChatGPT was sent on February 11, when she asked about head pain. In its response, the chatbot described the pain as not dangerous and related to recovery. Wang’s body was found three days later; a postmortem test showed a lamotrigine level of 0.64 micrograms per milliliter — about one-fifth of the lower limit of the drug’s therapeutic range.
The family believes OpenAI could have prevented the death by imposing a strict ban on medical advice concerning medications. The company called the situation extremely tragic and said it involved an older version of ChatGPT, while newer models are better at recognizing situations requiring urgent attention. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13 — the day after Wang’s death.
