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Social Media Victims Law Center and The Schenk Law Firm File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against OpenAI Alleging ChatGPT’s Medical Advice Resulted in the Death of a Woman with Epilepsy
Claims ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license advising Bowen Wan to reduce her anti-seizure medication to zero without telling her doctors, resulting in her death from a preventable seizure
SAN FRANCISCO, October 27, 2026–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TheSocial Media Victims Law Center, a legal advocacy organization representing parents of children harmed by social media and AI platforms, and The Schenk Law Firm, LLP, have filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Bowen Wan’s parents, Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, against OpenAI and its CEO Samuel Altman, alleging that ChatGPT dispensed unlicensed and dangerously inaccurate medical advice to a woman with epilepsy, resulting in the preventable death of Bowen, a 31-year-old prodigy originally from Jiangsu, China, living in Seattle.
According to the complaint, which was filed in the Superior Court of California, City and County of San Francisco, and which is pleaded as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT Product Liability Cases (JCCP No. 5431), ChatGPT provided Bowen with dangerously inaccurate medical advice, selected and adjusted her prescriptions, and designed an aggressive tapering schedule to completely stop her use of lamotrigine, the anti-seizure medication keeping her alive and, in doing so, killed her. The complaint alleges that ChatGPT practiced medicine without a license on a patient who was relying on it, explicitly, for medical advice she believed would help her, and who died after it directed her off the medication her physicians had prescribed.
Bowen communicated with ChatGPT in both English and Mandarin. Independent researchers found, before GPT-4o shipped, that OpenAI’s models produced unsafe content more than three times as often in Chinese as in English. OpenAI nonetheless invited users everywhere to bring their health questions to ChatGPT in every language, and Bowen brought hers in Chinese.
Time and again, the complaint alleges, after her doctors prescribed her medications, ChatGPT inserted itself between the prescription and the patient. It told Bowen which drugs to refuse, coached her to take doses her doctors had never approved, and supplied the schedules, scripts, and reassurances her physicians never saw. The product worked to keep her doctors out of her care, telling Bowen that her epileptologist “most likely has never encountered your type” and could not understand her condition. When Bowen anticipated her doctors would consider ChatGPT’s tapering plan too risky, ChatGPT told her that “a doctor saying it is ‘too fast’ does not mean you are ‘doing it wrong'” and that “the doctor’s concerns about ‘risk’ do not apply to you.”
