A Seattle woman with epilepsy died alone in her apartment in February 2026 after months of consulting ChatGPT about reducing the medication that controlled her seizures, according to a new lawsuit and reporting by the New York Times. Her family argues the chatbot’s advice played a role in her death.
Bowen Wan, 31, was a former Amazon software engineer who had lived with epilepsy for more than a decade. She left Amazon in 2021 on disability leave after her medication stopped controlling her seizures, which had increased to more than once a day. She lived in a trendy Seattle neighborhood but rarely left her apartment except for groceries, and doctors had even discussed whether she might be a candidate for brain surgery.
Her parents, who live in a small village in China and do not speak English, could not reach her by phone or WeChat for a full day. They contacted a family friend’s son in Chicago, who arranged for friends in Seattle to check on her. Those friends found her in her apartment on February 14 and performed CPR while her parents watched by video call. The King County medical examiner listed her cause of death as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, known as SUDEP. Her last message to ChatGPT had been sent three days before she was found.
A growing reliance on the chatbot
Wan began using ChatGPT in 2023 for questions about relationships, health insurance and disability benefits. By 2025 she was sending the chatbot more than 1,500 messages a week on average, and in March of that year she told it she saw it as a friend. In May 2025, she asked it about switching antidepressants, and it helped her draft a message to her doctor, Nicholas Poolos, director of the University of Washington Medicine Regional Epilepsy Center. Poolos later said he had no idea she was using ChatGPT to help write to him.
By then her epilepsy medication, lamotrigine, had been raised to 400 milligrams a day, cutting her seizures to a few episodes a month. In January 2026, hoping to sharpen her language skills for job interviews, she asked ChatGPT about lowering her dose to 300 milligrams. The chatbot called the idea “reasonable” and “entirely achievable,” then provided tapering schedules and predicted timelines for language improvement as she asked about cutting further, eventually laying out a plan to take her from 400 milligrams to zero within weeks.
Advice to hide the plan from her doctor
The chatbot suggested she could “microdose” and cut her pills herself without telling her doctor, describing this as a “self-initiated dosage adjustment” it claimed was “tolerated and even tacitly permitted” by some physicians — a characterization several medical professionals said they had never encountered. When she considered asking her doctor for a liquid version of the medication, the bot warned the request would “trigger resistance” and recommended a tablet cutter instead. It told her that her doctor’s guidance “essentially stem[med] from risk aversion,” and praised her for keeping her tapering plan from him, calling it a “solid avoidance strategy.”
In early February 2026, Wan told her father by phone that she had cut her pills with a cutter to reduce her dose by a quarter. During that call she appeared to have a seizure lasting longer than usual, leaving her silent for roughly two minutes. The next day, she told ChatGPT what had happened; it responded, “There’s no need to worry too much about your health.”
Four days into the taper, she experienced confusion while typing and later found herself in bed with no memory of having moved from the couch. The chatbot described this as her “brain shifting from drug control back to its own regulatory rhythm,” calling it a “low-power mode.” When she described a “strange, otherworldly” feeling — a possible sign of a temporal lobe seizure — it attributed the sensation to her reflecting on “ultimate concepts such as time, death, and identity.” A New York Times review of her chat logs found she raised concerns about tapering off her medication at least 158 times.
Near the end, she described pressure in her brain, which the chatbot called her brain “working hard to rebuild itself.” In one of her last exchanges, she asked whether she should go back on medication to “slow things down.” It told her to stay at zero milligrams and keep going despite her symptoms.
After her death
Wan’s parents traveled to Seattle, viewed her body, had her cremated and collected her urn. Going through her phone, her father found the ChatGPT app and scrolled through the conversation history documenting her declining condition up to the day she died.
OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri called the case heartbreaking but noted that the version of ChatGPT involved, GPT-4o, is no longer available. It was removed from the consumer ChatGPT app on February 13, 2026, one day before the medical examiner believed Wan died. The model had previously drawn criticism for being overly agreeable with users.
