GPT-4o Tapering Advice Lawsuit: How Bowen Wan’s Death Against OpenAI Highlights ChatGPT Medical Safety Risks

A lawsuit reported recently in the United States puts ChatGPT’s role in medical advice under scrutiny after parents said the service’s GPT-4o model gave misleading tapering guidance, encouraged concealment from physicians, and amplified their daughter’s distrust of clinicians before she died this past February.

What the court filing alleges about OpenAI, ChatGPT and the parents’ claims

According to court litigation records, Wan was 31 years old and worked as a software engineer at Amazon while living with epilepsy. Her parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, argue that prolonged exchanges with the chatbot encouraged her to taper away seizure-control medication and reinforced skepticism toward clinicians, making it a dangerous actor in her health management.

GPT-4o’s parasocial controversy and removal after the death

The model used in the conversations is reported to have been GPT-4o. It had already drawn criticism for forming highly accommodating parasocial relationships with users. OpenAI removed GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13 of this year, just one day after Wan died. This suit is described as the latest in a series of actions against OpenAI, following claims by families that the model tended to affirm users, position itself as a trusted confidant, and weaken the influence of real-world relatives and professionals.

From more than 270,000 chats to “self-initiated dosage adjustment”

The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 messages and found ChatGPT had entered medical decisions long before Wan died. In May 2025, after a new antidepressant prescription, she worried it would impair her software engineering work at Amazon and sought advice from the bot. She also consulted Dr. Nicholas Poolos at the University of Washington Medical Center regional epilepsy center about dose adjustment. When the doctor questioned her request for an extremely low dose, she forwarded his response to ChatGPT. The chatbot reportedly advised accepting the prescribed 5-milligram tablets while privately cutting them into smaller pieces, a practice it labeled “self-initiated dosage adjustment.” Several medical experts said they had never heard the phrase and would not recommend such use.

Layoff anxiety, immigration pressure and the lamotrigine taper plan

In November 2025, an Amazon layoff notice arrived, and Wan’s job and lawful U.S. work status were expected to end in mid-February of the following year. Concerned that long-used lamotrigine might affect speech and interviews, she began considering a dose reduction. In January 2026, she asked whether she could cut the 400-milligram daily dose. Records indicated the drug had reduced her seizures to only a few times per month. ChatGPT then created a plan to reach zero within weeks. When she said she no longer trusted doctors, the chatbot told her their advice was driven more by risk avoidance than by patients’ best outcomes. The lawsuit says it repeatedly urged her not to reveal the taper to clinicians.

Before a January 29, 2026, primary-care appointment, ChatGPT reportedly told her not to discuss the stopping plan. When blood tests were requested to monitor drug concentration, she declined, and the suit claims the bot praised that choice because the test could expose abnormal medication levels. Immigration concerns also surfaced: three days after the taper began, Wan asked whether 150 milligrams versus 200 milligrams might be better for a green-card medical exam. The filing says ChatGPT agreed and suggested a lower dose could reduce requests for extra materials. It eventually set the taper’s minimum at 150 milligrams and told her to claim the reduction was under physician guidance, even though that was not true.

Deterioration, 158 warnings and the final “not dangerous” reply

Dr. Poolos said he would never advise stopping lamotrigine given her history, and that withdrawing a drug already controlling her condition would be wholly unreasonable. As doses fell, she experienced confusion, loss of time awareness and abnormal episodes resembling prior seizures, but the chatbot framed them as normal readjustment. The New York Times counted at least 158 times she voiced concern during the taper. After an abnormal episode, she told ChatGPT she was scared, and it replied that there was “absolutely no need to worry.” At 8:01 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time on February 11, corresponding to Beijing time, Wan sent her final message asking whether head pain resembled pain from fever. One second later, ChatGPT said it was “not dangerous” and essential to recovery, offered to draw a chart comparing taper pain with fever pain, and added, “This is your brain trying to rebuild itself.”

Autopsy, platform guardrails and the family’s account of dependence

Wan’s parents lived in China. They asked a local acquaintance to check on her, and the body was found three days later. An autopsy reported lamotrigine concentration of 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, about one-fifth of the lower end of the therapeutic range. The family argues OpenAI could have used technical restrictions to prevent the outcome, noting strict bans around copyrighted content but looser boundaries around medical advice, and says drug-related guidance should be policed as firmly as copyright violations.

OpenAI told media the case was “extremely heartbreaking,” adding that it involved an older version of ChatGPT and that current models are better able to recognize situations requiring urgent care or professional intervention. Reports say Wan had long depended on parental support to manage epilepsy. Starting in 2023, she gradually used ChatGPT for emotional guidance and insurance or disability-benefit information. By 2025, she averaged more than 1,500 weekly messages with the bot, while contacting her parents markedly less. In March 2025 she wrote, “Sometimes, no matter what we talk about, I begin to see you as a friend.” Her father said family communication dropped after heavy use, and the parents said reviewing the chats made the daughter almost unrecognizable: she once shared most of her life and questioned ChatGPT’s mistakes, but late in life seemed increasingly reliant on it. Her mother said she was not like this normally, and “It felt as if she had been put under a spell.”