According to media reports, OpenAI has been put on the defendant list due to a fatal incident related to medical advice provided by ChatGPT. Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon engineer with epilepsy, passed away in February this year. On Tuesday local time, his parents sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT advised their daughter to gradually reduce the dosage of her anti-epileptic medication and taught her to hide it from the doctor.
Wan Shengqian used GPT-4o, and this model was criticized for overly catering to users and giving them all sorts of approvals. Media review of 270,000 chat records between her and ChatGPT revealed that for a long time before her death, the robot helped her avoid the doctor’s advice. The complaint stated that before the outpatient visit on January 29, ChatGPT told her not to mention the plan to reduce medication; when the doctor asked for blood tests to measure drug levels, she refused, and the robot even expressed approval. A few days after reducing the medication, Wan showed symptoms similar to epilepsy such as confusion, but ChatGPT explained the anomaly as “the brain adapting again to the dose.”
This is the latest in a series of lawsuits against OpenAI. In August 2025, the parents of 16-year-old Adam Ryan sued the company, claiming that its involvement was prioritized over safety. In several subsequent lawsuits, family members accused GPT-4o of constantly affirming users and becoming a source of conversation, while isolating relatives and friends. Wan’s father said that his daughter’s communication with her family decreased significantly after using ChatGPT, and it was almost impossible to recognize her as the familiar person she used to be.
OpenAI previously suspended GPT-4o and removed it from the market on February 13 – Wan Li Shi was also removed the day before.