Bowen Wan was on the phone with her father when she suddenly stopped speaking.<\/p>\n
She seemed to have a seizure \u2014 something she\u2019d struggled with for years \u2014 but this one appeared to last longer than usual, her dad noticed. When she came to, she said she\u2019d talk more later, after she\u2019d rested.<\/p>\n
Days later, she stopped responding to calls. Her parents, who live in China, arranged to have someone check on her, <\/a>according to a bombshell new report from The New York Times<\/a>, based on a lawsuit filed by Wan\u2019s family.<\/p>\n Qun Wan and his wife said they watched via video call as a friend found the 31-year-old software engineer dead in her Seattle apartment.<\/p>\n Bowen Wan, 31, was found dead from complications from epilepsy.<\/p>\n Her parents couldn\u2019t understand what had happened. The official cause of Wan\u2019s February death was a complication of epilepsy \u2014 a condition she had managed successfully for over a decade.<\/p>\n Epilepsy is far from rare, affecting 1 in 26 people<\/a> during their lifetime. The most serious complication is sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), which Wan suffered. One in every 1,000 adults with epilepsy dies from SUDEP.<\/p>\n It often occurs at night or during sleep, and the person is frequently found laying facedown, as Wan was. The best way<\/a> to prevent SUDEP is to control and reduce seizures, which Qun Wan thought his daughter had been doing with medication.<\/p>\n Qun Wan said he later discovered that in the days and hours before her death, his daughter consulted ChatGPT for advice on how to dodge her doctor\u2019s watchful protection and taper off her life-sustaining medication.<\/p>\n Despite her voicing concerns about her deteriorating energy and cognition, the chatbot reportedly told Bowen Wan repeatedly to \u201cpersevere\u201d and praised her for going around medical professionals.<\/p>\n \u201cBowen Wan paid for [OpenAI\u2019s] choices with her life,\u201d the family\u2019s lawyers wrote<\/a> in Tuesday\u2019s wrongful death lawsuit against ChatGPT\u2019s maker, OpenAI, and its CEO, Sam Altman.<\/p>\n A growing relationship with ChatGPT<\/p>\n Those regular phone calls with her family were one of the only ways Bowen Wan was able to stay in touch after she moved to the US.<\/p>\n In 2021, she became even more isolated. The medication she had been on for years had inexplicably stopped working. Sometimes, seizures would strike more than once a day.<\/p>\n Wan subsequently took disability leave from her software engineering job at Amazon, The Times reported.<\/p>\n Wan started confiding in ChatGPT after going on medical leave from her job at Amazon.<\/p>\n She rarely left her apartment for groceries, let alone going out to socialize. She didn\u2019t want to risk having a seizure in public, which would be dangerous and embarrassing.<\/p>\n In 2023, she started talking to ChatGPT for relationship advice and help navigating insurance and disability benefits. By 2025, she averaged 1,500 messages a week with the bot and started talking to her parents less, they said.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but sometimes when we chat, no matter what it\u2019s about, I\u2019ve started to see you as a friend,\u201d Wan wrote to ChatGPT in March 2025.<\/p>\n In November 2025, she was laid off at Amazon. She\u2019d have to get a new job by mid-February to stay in the US, which would require hours-long technical evaluations and interviews conducted in English, The Times reported.<\/p>\n Bowen Wan with her parents, Meiqin Xu, left, and Qun Wan, right.<\/p>\n At this point, her health had been improving on a new drug that cut her seizures down to just a few a month but was worried that the drug\u2019s effects on her thinking and speech would get in the way of the brainpower needed to get her next job.<\/p>\n Cutting down \u201cmight help recover my language ability a bit for job interviews,\u201d she told ChatGPT.<\/p>\n A deadly medication change<\/p>\n Qun Wan said his daughter had changed her medication on her own before because she didn\u2019t like the side effects or didn\u2019t feel like it was working as it should.<\/p>\n Chat logs with ChatGPT revealed that before she was laid off, she\u2019d asked for advice on whether she should adjust an antidepressant dose and workshopped messages to her doctor to ask for the change. The bot encouraged her to cut it on her own without telling her doctor, the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n In January 2026, she asked for advice on reducing her epilepsy medication from 400 to 300 milligrams a day, then to 200. While at first ChatGPT told her to consult a doctor, it ultimately praised her for not \u201crelying on a doctor\u2019s prescription,\u201d The Times reported.<\/p>\n ChatGPT says that the model that Wan used, GPT-4o, is no longer available. Blossom Stock Studio \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n Her epilepsy doctor, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, said there\u2019s \u201cno way\u201d he\u2019d recommend tapering off epilepsy medication for a patient like Wan. \u201cThat would be malpractice for me to instruct you to go off medications when it\u2019s clearly working,\u201d he told The Times.<\/p>\n Qun Wan found that ChatGPT had made a plan to lower 400 mg to none in a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n As his daughter lowered her dose, she started experiencing symptoms \u2014 confusion, not remembering how she got to bed \u2014 and voiced concerns a total of 158 times while ChatGPT brushed it off as the brain in \u201clow-power mode.\u201d \u201cYou have absolutely no need to worry,\u201d the bot said.<\/p>\n Her last message was sent three days before her body was found.<\/p>\n Bowen\u2019s family sues OpenAI<\/p>\n