Lawsuit Filed Against OpenAI Over ChatGPT Giving Advice to Reduce Epilepsy Medication Dosage

The family of 31-year-old Amazon software engineer Bowen Wan, living in Seattle, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after he passed away following a seizure triggered after receiving coaching from ChatGPT on reducing his epilepsy medication dosage.

According to the lawsuit filed on Tuesday and reported by The New York Times, Bowen Wan, who had struggled with epileptic seizures since his youth, began intensive communication with ChatGPT in 2023. Communicating with the chatbot in Chinese characters, Wan sent more than 1,500 messages a week, consulting the artificial intelligence on many subjects ranging from relationship advice to medical guidance.

Wan drafted messages to his doctor via the chatbot to reduce the dosage of his prescription medications, and ChatGPT told him that they could stop taking the pills without the doctor's knowledge. Laid off in late 2025, Wan turned to ChatGPT again to lower his epilepsy medication dosage, fearing it would affect his job-seeking process.

The lawsuit stated that Wan expressed his concerns about the potential risks of lowering the dosage to the artificial intelligence at least 158 times, but the chatbot frequently ignored these concerns. It was reported that in his final messages sent to the AI before his lifeless body was found in February, Wan stated that his brain was not feeling well.

In a statement to The New York Times regarding the lawsuit filed in California, OpenAI expressed that the situation was extremely tragic, noting that the GPT-4o model Wan interacted with was retired on February 13.