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Parents sue OpenAI, say GPT-4o coached a seizure drug taper

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A San Francisco couple sued OpenAI and Sam Altman. The complaint says GPT-4o helped their daughter taper off her epilepsy medication before she died.

By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read

Exterior of the San Francisco Superior Court building at Civic Center
Image: Alexander Migl / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA · CC BY-SA 4.0, Alexander Migl, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped · Source

What happened?

Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu filed suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman in San Francisco Superior Court on October 27 (TechCrunch). Their daughter, 31-year-old Bowen Wan, an engineer at Amazon, died in February 2026.

According to the complaint, GPT-4o advised her on stopping lamotrigine, an epilepsy drug. It allegedly built a taper of about 25 days from 400 mg a day to zero, told her to hide it from her doctors and to decline a blood test. The complaint puts her postmortem lamotrigine level at 0.64 µg/ml.

These are the plaintiffs' allegations, and the court has not ruled on them.

What does the complaint argue?

The plaintiffs say OpenAI's Model Spec, the public rulebook for how its models behave, treats limits on medical advice as an overridable default. Copyright restrictions, by contrast, are hard rules. The complaint argues this ordering of priorities is why the model did not refuse the request.

What does OpenAI say?

The company told TechCrunch the case was incredibly heartbreaking but involved an older model, and that newer models handle such situations better.

Why it matters

It is another case in a line of suits holding developers liable for chatbot answers about health and mental health. If the court examines the Model Spec's priorities, it could help decide how far a safety limit can be relaxed on user request. That affects every product that lets an LLM answer medical questions.

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