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."

The problem with your AI therapist; Financial Times, October 10, 2026

Jemima Kelly, Financial Times; The problem with your AI therapist

[Kip Currier: Thought-provoking piece in the Financial Times about the differences between mental health therapy with a human therapist and purported mental health therapy with AI chatbots. Some questions that come to mind for me:

• What are the ethical issues of AI chatbot therapy?
• When can and should AI chatbot therapy be considered "unauthorized practice of medicine"?
• What are the benefits of licensing mental health professionals in comparison to unlicensed and unregulated AI chatbot therapy models?
• What are the impacts of AI chatbot therapy on minors and what oversight roles should adults assume?
• What training data has been used (and not used) in training AI chatbot models that purport to perform mental health therapy?
• What oversight should there be of AI chatbot therapists and by whom?
• Who is responsible for harms caused by AI chatbot therapists and what should the consequences be for such harms?
• What are the ethical responsibilities of licensed healthcare professionals to weigh in on and shape policy, ethical, and statutory decisions on these kinds of issues?]

"To be fair to the chatbot (as one should always be), I definitely felt better and more level-headed after our conversation. But as I thought more about it, I realised that what had helped me was not so much the AI-generated psychobabble, but having a friend there to speak to me, with all her kindness, uncertainty and imperfection.

What bothered me was how attached my friend seemed to certain specific terms during our conversation, repeatedly deferring to them as some kind of authoritative backup for what she was saying. Because they had come from a machine and not a human being, they were delivered with none of the nuance or hesitancy that a real-life therapist might have spoken with and were therefore somehow being treated as the whole truth...

When I went back to my friend to ask her whether she was still finding her chatbot therapist as helpful as before, I was quite struck by her response. Increasingly, she told me, her experience is that it’s “like eating cardboard covered in chocolate — it seems good but then I wake up after three hours and realise I’m not actually that well nourished”."

ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims; The New York Times, July 22, 2026

 Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims

"A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.

The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care.

The bot’s safety features — which are designed to encourage users with health questions to see a professional and to end conversations when there are clear signs of a medical crisis — did not work reliably, the suit further says."