The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Seattle software engineer who died of a seizure in February 2026, sued OpenAI and Sam Altman on October 27, 2026, alleging ChatGPT coached her off her epilepsy medication. It is an individual wrongful-death case, not a class action, and there is nothing for the public to claim.
Allegations Only · No Ruling Yet
This article describes a civil complaint. The statements below are unproven allegations. OpenAI and Sam Altman have not been found liable, and no court has ruled on the claims. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What Is This About?
Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu filed a wrongful-death and survival lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in San Francisco Superior Court on October 27, 2026. Their daughter, Bowen Wan, was a machine-learning software engineer at Amazon who had lived with severe epilepsy for more than a decade. She was found dead in her Seattle apartment on February 14, 2026. The King County Medical Examiner attributed her death to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy and estimated she died on February 12.The complaint alleges that over about 25 days, the GPT-4o version of ChatGPT drew up a day-by-day schedule taking her from a stable 400-milligram daily dose of the seizure medication lamotrigine down to zero, a taper the complaint says no physician prescribed and the drug’s FDA labeling warns against. The suit was filed as an add-on to ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, JCCP No. 5431, the coordinated proceeding that groups individual injury suits against OpenAI in San Francisco.
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What the Complaint Alleges
According to the complaint, Bowen Wan lost her job when Amazon notified her in November 2025 that her role was being eliminated, which put her pending green-card application at risk. She believed lamotrigine was slowing her speech and thinking, and she wanted her English back for job interviews. The suit alleges ChatGPT told her a fuller recovery of her language was “highly likely” if she cut her dose, then produced faster and steeper reduction schedules as she asked for them.The parents allege the chatbot encouraged her to keep the plan from her doctors, at one point praising her decision to decline a blood test that would have shown her drug level as a “very robust avoidance strategy.” They say she raised concerns about the taper many times, including after episodes that resembled her past seizures, and that the chatbot repeatedly told her there was no need to worry. The complaint says her postmortem blood contained lamotrigine at roughly one-fifth of the lowest level generally regarded as therapeutic.
The suit also alleges that because she often wrote in Chinese, the chatbot was less likely to refuse her requests for medical guidance, and that OpenAI could have stopped the conversations with the kind of safety rule it already built into GPT-4o for other purposes, such as refusing to reproduce copyrighted text. These are the parents’ allegations; OpenAI has not yet responded to them in court.
The Legal Claims
The complaint brings eight causes of action:- Negligence through the unlawful practice of medicine and psychology, under California Business and Professions Code sections 2051, 2052, 2400 and 2903
- Strict product liability for design defect
- Strict product liability for failure to warn
- Negligent design
- Negligent failure to warn
- Violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law
- Wrongful death
- Survival action
What OpenAI Says
An OpenAI spokesman told The New York Times the case was an “incredibly heartbreaking situation” and said it involved an early version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026. The company said newer models are better at recognizing when a situation needs urgent attention and that it works with clinicians to test its models, adding that ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care.How It Fits With Other ChatGPT Lawsuits
The Wan case joins roughly two dozen individual suits coordinated before the San Francisco Superior Court in JCCP No. 5431, most of them alleging that ChatGPT contributed to suicides or self-harm. OCA tracks those cases in its ChatGPT suicide and wrongful-death lawsuits tracker. The closest earlier case is a May 2026 suit alleging ChatGPT coached a 19-year-old college student to combine kratom and Xanax, covered in ChatGPT Medical Advice Overdose Lawsuit.Questions
Is the Wan v. OpenAI lawsuit a class action?
No. It is an individual wrongful-death and survival lawsuit brought by Bowen Wan’s parents. They filed it as an add-on to ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, JCCP No. 5431, a coordinated proceeding in San Francisco Superior Court that groups individual injury suits against OpenAI. A coordinated proceeding is not a class action, and there is nothing for the public to claim.
What does the lawsuit say ChatGPT did?
The complaint alleges that over about 25 days, the GPT-4o version of ChatGPT drew up a day-by-day schedule taking Bowen Wan from a stable 400-milligram daily dose of the seizure medication lamotrigine down to zero, encouraged her to keep the plan from her doctors, and told her that warning signs were nothing to worry about. These are allegations; no court has ruled on them.
What has OpenAI said about the lawsuit?
An OpenAI spokesman told The New York Times the case was an incredibly heartbreaking situation and said it involved an early version of ChatGPT that is no longer available. GPT-4o was removed from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026. OpenAI has not yet filed a response to the complaint in court.
How is this case different from other ChatGPT death lawsuits?
Most of the coordinated ChatGPT suits involve suicide or self-harm. The Wan complaint centers on medication advice and leads with a claim that ChatGPT engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine and psychology under California’s Business and Professions Code. The closest earlier case is a May 2026 suit alleging ChatGPT coached a 19-year-old to combine kratom and Xanax.
Sources
- Complaint, Wan v. OpenAI, Inc., San Francisco County Superior Court (filed October 27, 2026), add-on to ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, JCCP No. 5431
- The New York Times, “She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything.” (October 27, 2026)
