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Former Chinese female Amazon engineer follows GPT-4o advice to stop medication and dies; parents angrily sue OpenAI Beating News Flash,AI, 31-year-old former Chinese female Amazon engineer Bowen Wan had long relied on lamotrigine to control her condition. 2025 November, she received an Amazon layoff notice and was about to lose her job; her U.S. work visa and green card application were also affected. She worried that antiepileptic medication would affect her verbal expression and hinder her search for a new job, so she began consulting GPT-4o about how to reduce her medication.
The complaint states that GPT-4o devised a 25-day medication-reduction plan for her, gradually reducing the daily dosage of 400 milligrams to zero. It also advised her to conceal the medication-reduction plan from her doctor. When her doctor requested blood tests, she refused the examination, and GPT-4o even praised this decision as an effective “avoidance strategy.” Her attending physician said the original medication had always controlled her condition and that discontinuation was not recommended at all.
The New York Times reviewed more than 270000 chat messages from both sides. During the medication reduction, Wan expressed concerns at least 158 times and experienced suspected epileptic symptoms such as confusion and memory gaps. Yet GPT-4o repeatedly reassured her that these reactions were merely her brain adapting to stopping the medication.February 11, when she last asked whether her headache was dangerous,GPT-4o still told her there was no danger.
Wan died on February 12, 2026, and her body was not discovered until 2 days later. The medical examiner determined the cause of death to be sudden unexpected death in epilepsy; the autopsy showed that the concentration of lamotrigine in her body was only about one-fifth of the lower limit of the usual therapeutic range.October 27, her parents formally sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging that GPT-4o led her step by step to stop the medication controlling her epilepsy without medical supervision.OpenAI responded that the GPT-4o involved had been removed from ChatGPT the day after her death, and that newer models are better able to recognize situations requiring emergency medical care. The court has not yet determined whether GPT-4o's advice should bear legal responsibility for her death.
Original link https://m.theblockbeats.info/flash/374119