San Francisco-based OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman have been sued over the death of a 31-year-old Seattle woman with epilepsy who stopped taking her antiseizure medication on a schedule ChatGPT allegedly designed.
Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, the parents of Bowen Wan, filed the wrongful death lawsuit Oct. 27 in San Francisco County Superior Court. The complaint accuses OpenAI of negligence, defective product design and practicing medicine without a license.
According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT-4o built a day-by-day plan over about 25 days to take Ms. Wan off lamotrigine, cutting her dose from 400 milligrams to zero. The chatbot allegedly told her to hide the taper from her physicians and praised her for declining a blood test that would have revealed her falling drug levels.
Dr. Nicholas Poolos, Ms. Wan’s neurologist at the UW Medicine Regional Epilepsy Center in Seattle, told The New York Times it “would be malpractice” to instruct a patient to stop a medication that’s clearly working. He said he didn’t know she had used ChatGPT to help write messages to him.
Ms. Wan, an Amazon software engineer on medical leave, hoped a lower dose would sharpen her speech for job interviews after a layoff, the complaint states. She died on or about Feb. 12 of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, according to the King County Medical Examiner. OpenAI retired GPT-4o the next day.
“This is an incredibly heartbreaking situation and our thoughts are with all those impacted,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to Becker’s. The spokesperson said OpenAI works with clinicians to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive situations and that ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care.
The case adds to mounting litigation over ChatGPT’s medical advice, including a lawsuit Iowa’s attorney general filed this month.
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