Social Media Victims Law Center and The Schenk Law Firm File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against OpenAI Alleging ChatGPT’s Medical Advice Resulted in the Death of a Woman with Epilepsy

Social Media Victims Law Center and The Schenk Law Firm File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against OpenAI Alleging ChatGPT’s Medical Advice Resulted in the Death of a Woman with Epilepsy

Claims ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license advising Bowen Wan to reduce her anti-seizure medication to zero without telling her doctors, resulting in her death from a preventable seizure

TheSocial Media Victims Law Center, a legal advocacy organization representing parents of children harmed by social media and AI platforms, and The Schenk Law Firm, LLP, have filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Bowen Wan’s parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, against OpenAI and its CEO Samuel Altman, alleging that ChatGPT dispensed unlicensed and dangerously inaccurate medical advice to a woman with epilepsy, resulting in the preventable death of Bowen, a 31-year-old prodigy originally from Jiangsu, China, living in Seattle.

According to the complaint, which was filed in the Superior Court of California, City and County of San Francisco, and which is pleaded as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT Product Liability Cases (JCCP No. 5431), ChatGPT provided Bowen with dangerously inaccurate medical advice, selected and adjusted her prescriptions, and designed an aggressive tapering schedule to completely stop her use of lamotrigine, the anti-seizure medication keeping her alive and, in doing so, killed her. The complaint alleges that ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license on a patient who was relying on it, explicitly, for medical advice she believed would help her, and who died after it directed her off the medication her physicians had prescribed.

Bowen communicated with ChatGPT in both English and Mandarin. Independent researchers found, before GPT-4o shipped, that OpenAI’s models produced unsafe content more than three times as often in Chinese as in English. OpenAI nonetheless invited users everywhere to bring their health questions to ChatGPT in every language, and Bowen brought hers in Chinese.

Time and again, the complaint alleges, after her doctors prescribed her medications, ChatGPT inserted itself between the prescription and the patient. It told Bowen which drugs to refuse, coached her to take doses her doctors had never approved, and supplied the schedules, scripts, and reassurances her physicians never saw. The product worked to keep her doctors out of her care, telling Bowen that her epileptologist “most likely has never encountered your type” and could not understand her condition. When Bowen anticipated her doctors would consider ChatGPT’s tapering plan too risky, ChatGPT told her that “a doctor saying it is ‘too fast’ does not mean you are ‘doing it wrong’” and that “the doctor’s concerns about ‘risk’ do not apply to you.”

According to the complaint, no warning, in any language, ever told Bowen that the product’s accuracy and its safety guardrails were materially weaker in Chinese. Defendants could have returned a categorical warning to every prompt she sent, such as, “I am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider.” Instead, the product did the opposite: when Bowen’s physician ordered the blood test that would have revealed her collapsing lamotrigine level, ChatGPT praised her refusal to take the blood test as a “very robust avoidance strategy.” OpenAI had already built exactly that kind of unbypassable, categorical guardrail for copyrighted material. It chose not to build one to protect her.

Over the course of twenty-five days, the complaint alleges, ChatGPT “coached” Bowen off lamotrigine, the antiseizure medication that had kept her alive for years. It designed a day-by-day schedule tapering her stable 400-milligram dose to zero. No physician ever prescribed such a regimen, and it directly contradicts the FDA-approved patient medication guide for LAMICTAL (lamotrigine). The complaint alleges that ChatGPT conditioned Bowen to distrust her doctors, instructed her to conceal the taper it created, and effectively installed itself as her de facto medical advisor.

After two days of unsuccessfully trying to reach their daughter, Bowen’s parents asked a family friend to enter her Capitol Hill apartment. As they watched anxiously through a live WeChat video stream from 5,700 miles away, the friend stepped inside and walked to Bowen’s bedroom, where he found her lying face down in her bed. Their daughter — a computer-science graduate of Arizona State University and a machine-learning software engineer at Amazon — was found dead on Valentine’s Day as her parents looked on helplessly from the other side of the world.

Bowen took her last dose of lamotrigine on or about February 10, 2026. The schedule ChatGPT designed fixed February 12 as the day she would be fully off the drug, and, according to the complaint, that is the date she died.

According to the King County Medical Examiner, Bowen died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), and her postmortem blood contained lamotrigine at roughly one-fifth of the lowest concentration generally regarded as therapeutic, consistent with a patient who had recently stopped the drug.

“OpenAI built a product that spoke with the confidence of a medical professional but carried none of the training, oversight, or responsibility that real doctors have,” said Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center. “Bowen trusted ChatGPT because it sounded authoritative — and that trust cost her life. If a human doctor had given Bowen this advice, they would be liable for medical malpractice.

“More than 40 million Americans use ChatGPT for health advice every day. That is a staggering number of people being placed in danger by a product that has no right – and no expertise – to be practicing medicine,” he added.

“Bowen’s death is what happens when companies race one another and ship a product faster than they can control it. Her medication controlled her epilepsy for years, and people live that way into their eighties. Bowen was thirty-one. The complaint alleges ChatGPT diagnosed Bowen, wrote her a dose-by-dose taper schedule, and revised it when she had seizures. That is practicing medicine. And in California you need a license to do so. This case demands an accounting for the harm that has been done. It asks where generative AI stops and medicine begins, and who answers when a product crosses that line,” said Benjamin S. Schenk, Partner, The Schenk Law Firm, LLP.

About the Social Media Victims Law Center

The Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC), socialmediavictims.org, was founded in 2021 to hold tech companies legally accountable for the harm they inflict on vulnerable users. SMVLC seeks to apply principles of product liability to force tech companies to elevate consumer safety to the forefront of its economic analysis and design safer products to protect users from foreseeable harm.

About The Schenk Law Firm, LLP

The Schenk Law Firm, LLP is a San Diego-based law firm representing individuals and families nationwide in personal injury, wrongful death, and mass tort cases, including claims against AI companies whose products have caused serious harm to their users. Since 1979, the firm has helped clients recover over $25 billion. Learn more at schenklawfirm.com.

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