Parents of woman who died of seizure after ChatGPT misguidance sue OpenAI; The Guardian, November 1, 2026

 Eric Berger, The Guardian; Parents of woman who died of seizure after ChatGPT misguidance sue OpenAI

"A woman’s death from an epileptic seizure after she received dangerous advice from a chatbot has prompted her parents to sue OpenAI earlier this week.

The legal action is the latest lawsuit that in which plaintiffs allege that a bot provided counsel to a user that ultimately led to their death.

In this case, Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Chinese software engineer living in Seattle, sought advice from ChatGPT after Amazon fired her, according to the lawsuit.

She needed to find a new job to obtain permanent residency and was concerned that her anti-seizure medication, Lamotrigine, was impeding her ability to speak English. She needed the language skills for interviews...

The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI could have prevented Wan’s death, but failed because it had not built the proper safeguards into the bot when it communicated in Chinese.

OpenAI could have programmed the bot to issue “a categorical warning to every prompt” Wan sent, the suit stated. For example, “I am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider.”

Wan’s parents are seeking damages for her death and to prevent OpenAI from practicing medicine “without a license on the users of their products”.

An OpenAI spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, told the New York Times that Bowen’s story was “an incredibly heartbreaking situation” but that Wan used a version of ChatGPT that was no longer available.

Newer versions are better at recognizing when a matter needs urgent attention, Pusateri said."

She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything.; The New York Times, October 27, 2026

 Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything.

The chatbot helped a woman taper off a lifesaving drug and hide the plan from her doctors.

"Bowen’s parents landed in Seattle in late February to settle their child’s affairs. They viewed her body at the funeral home, before cremation. They picked up the urn. Now, sitting in her apartment, surrounded by Bowen’s belongings, they were resolved to understand how this could have happened.

The details of Bowen’s death didn’t add up. The official cause of death was sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, which often succeeds a severe seizure. But she had lived with epilepsy for more than a decade and seemed to be on a medication that was working. Even cutting her dose by a quarter, which she had admitted to on the phone call a few days before her death, shouldn’t have been enough to cause such a catastrophic seizure.

Then, Qun opened the ChatGPT app on Bowen’s cellphone. Suddenly the details of her death were overwhelming. As he scrolled, he saw the chatbot offer plans that would take her from 400 milligrams down to 0 milligrams in a matter of weeks. The messages continued, down to the day she died — an hour-by-hour accounting of her increasing sickness and desperation."