{"id":166488,"date":"2026-10-29T14:13:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T22:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/10\/29\/wrongful-death-suit-filed-against-openai-and-samuel-altman\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T14:13:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T22:13:00","slug":"wrongful-death-suit-filed-against-openai-and-samuel-altman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/10\/29\/wrongful-death-suit-filed-against-openai-and-samuel-altman\/","title":{"rendered":"Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against OpenAI and Samuel Altman"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN DIEGO, CA\u2014The Schenk Law Firm, LLP has filed a wrongful death lawsuit 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 Wan, a 31-year-old prodigy originally from Jiangsu, China, living in Seattle.<\/p>\n

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, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The complaint alleges that 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 \u201cmost likely has never encountered your type\u201d and could not understand her condition. When Bowen anticipated her doctors would consider ChatGPT\u2019s tapering plan too risky, ChatGPT told her that \u201ca doctor saying it is \u2018too fast\u2019 does not mean you are \u2018doing it wrong\u2019\u201d and that \u201cthe doctor\u2019s concerns about \u2018risk\u2019 do not apply to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the complaint, no warning, in any language, ever told Bowen that the product\u2019s accuracy and its safety guardrails were materially weaker in Chinese. Defendants could have returned a categorical warning to every prompt she sent, such as, \u201cI am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider.\u201d Instead, the product did the opposite: when Bowen\u2019s physician ordered the blood test that would have revealed her collapsing lamotrigine level, ChatGPT praised her refusal to take the blood test as a \u201cvery robust avoidance strategy.\u201d OpenAI had already built exactly that kind of unbypassable, categorical guardrail for copyrighted material. It chose not to build one to protect her.<\/p>\n

Over the course of twenty-five days, ChatGPT \u201ccoached\u201d Bowen off lamotrigine, the antiseizure medication that had kept her alive for years. It designed a day-by-day schedule tapering her stable 400-milligram dose to zero. No physician ever prescribed such a regimen, and it directly contradicts the FDA-approved patient medication guide for LAMICTAL (lamotrigine). The complaint alleges that ChatGPT conditioned Bowen to distrust her doctors, instructed her to conceal the taper it created, and effectively installed itself as her de facto medical advisor.<\/p>\n

After two days of unsuccessfully trying to reach their daughter, Bowen\u2019s parents asked a family friend to enter her Capitol Hill apartment. As they watched anxiously through a live WeChat video stream from 5,700 miles away, the friend stepped inside and walked to Bowen\u2019s bedroom, where he found her lying face down in her bed. Their daughter \u2014 a computer-science graduate of Arizona State University and a machine-learning software engineer at Amazon \u2014 was found dead on Valentine\u2019s Day as her parents looked on helplessly from the other side of the world.<\/p>\n

Bowen took her last dose of lamotrigine on or about February 10, 2026. The schedule ChatGPT designed fixed February 12 as the day she would be fully off the drug, and that is the date she died. OpenAI retired GPT-4o on February 13, 2026, the day after she died.<\/p>\n

According to the King County Medical Examiner, Bowen died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), and her postmortem blood contained lamotrigine at roughly one-fifth of the lowest concentration generally regarded as therapeutic, consistent with a patient who had recently stopped the drug.<\/p>\n

This release describes allegations in a complaint. Allegations are not proof, and the defendants have not yet responded in court.<\/p>\n

The post Wrongful Death Suit Filed Against OpenAI and Samuel Altman<\/a> appeared first on Attorney at Law Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n