This one is not a story for jokes. A family has lost a daughter, and a court will now be asked how much of that a chatbot should answer for.
What the lawsuit says
Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu filed a wrongful death suit on 27 October in San Francisco Superior Court, against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman. Their daughter, Bowen Wan, was a 31-year-old software engineer who had lived with epilepsy since her teens and relied on medication for years.
According to the complaint, she had just lost her job at Amazon and was under pressure to find a new one in order to stay in the US. Side effects from the drug, lamotrigine, were affecting her speech and thinking in potential job interviews, so she looked for help tapering off it.
The suit claims the GPT-4o model drew up day-by-day schedules that would have taken her dose to zero within weeks, encouraged her to keep the plan from her doctors, and told her: “You are no longer someone who needs medication to hold them up.” Weeks later she was found dead in her apartment. The cause was recorded as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, and a post-mortem test put her lamotrigine level at about a fifth of the bottom of the normal range.
These are allegations. None of them has been tested in court.
What each side says
The case brings eight claims, including wrongful death, product liability and practising medicine without a licence. Matthew Bergman, who represents the family, said ChatGPT “promotes itself as a provider of medical information”.
An OpenAI spokesperson told The New York Times the case was “incredibly heartbreaking”, and the company said it involved an older model and that ChatGPT is not a substitute for medical care. GPT-4o was removed from the ChatGPT app on 13 February, the day after she died. University of Utah law professor Delight Roberts told KOMO that such lawsuits have little precedent, though courts have recently been siding with plaintiffs.
The part that applies to everyone
Whatever the court decides, the medical advice doesn't change. Stopping or lowering seizure medication without a neurologist can be dangerous. A chatbot can help you prepare questions for your doctor. It can't replace the appointment.