Behind the passing of the Chinese female engineer who died of epilepsy: 270,000 conversations with AI after leaving the top-tier tech giant

Wan Bowen's life originally seemed full of upward possibilities: a girl living with epilepsy secured a well-paid, decent job at a tech company through her own efforts. Few people knew that all of this was achieved through unwavering willpower, even at the cost of sacrificing her physical health.

In moments of despair, pills and AI became the things she clung to to hold control over her own body. She seized every possible chance she could grab just to avoid breaking down, but her body still retaliated against her in some way.

On the other side of the story, when AI follows the patient's wishes and gives the answers she wants, can it really ensure that it is giving "correct" responses? Can today's AI really hold the bottom line of "do no harm to humans"?

On October 27, a pair of Chinese parents filed a lawsuit in the U.S. state of California, suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. They allege that ChatGPT provided dangerous and incorrect medical advice to their daughter Wan Bowen (transliteration), and even encouraged her to hide her dose-reduction plan from her doctor.

Wan Bowen was a Chinese engineer residing in Seattle who had lived with epilepsy for about 17 years. In mid-February this year, she was found deceased in her apartment in Seattle, at the age of only 31.

(Wan Bowen joined Amazon after graduating from university in 2019. Photo / The New York Times)

The complaint submitted by Wan Bowen's parents mentions that Bowen, who was in a critical period of her life, worried that anti-epileptic drugs would affect her thinking and verbal expression, and further impact job interviews and getting a green card, so she consulted ChatGPT about a dose reduction plan. Before that, she had worked in the United States for 6 years, and she needed a job at that time to stabilize her life.

During the dose reduction period, she expressed her concerns and described physical abnormalities many times, but kept receiving reassurance and dose reduction suggestions from ChatGPT. The forensic doctor determined that she died of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP); the autopsy showed that the concentration of the relevant drug in her body was about one-fifth of the lower limit of the therapeutic concentration.

After being diagnosed with epilepsy, two attempts to stop medication

In November 2025, on Bowen's 31st birthday, she received a layoff notice from Amazon, becoming one of the roughly 14,000 corporate positions the company announced it would cut in October that year. This was Amazon's largest round of layoffs since it cut a total of about 27,000 positions from 2022 to 2023.

(In October 2025, Amazon announced its layoff plan. Photo / Yicai)

Just one month before that, she had just been approved to submit an application for legal permanent resident status (i.e. green card), and was originally just waiting for her immigration lawyer to start the processing procedure. It had been three and a half years since she submitted her employment-based immigration application. (Note: After submitting an employment-based immigration application, you need to wait for the green card priority date to become current, and you can only continue to submit the application when you meet the time conditions, and this type of application still requires proof from the U.S. employer.) However, the sudden layoff interrupted her originally steadily progressing life plan.

Six years after graduation, she joined Amazon's headquarters in Seattle as a software development engineer, participating in the development of the book recommendation system. It is not easy for international students to enter tech giants like Amazon, and the interviews are extremely difficult. Many interviewees will complete thousands of engineer interview programming questions on an online platform called LeetCode to prepare for 3 to 4 rounds of online interviews.

Her employment relationship with Amazon will be terminated on February 11, 2026. She needed to find a new job within three months, or secure an internal transfer at Amazon, to keep her green card application valid. For Bowen at that time, this was almost an "impossible" task.

As epilepsy had seriously affected her life, the complaint shows that Wan Bowen had 4 to 10 seizures per month, making it difficult for her to continue working. According to The New York Times, as early as the end of 2021, she began to take medical disability leave. Bowen hardly went out except to buy daily necessities at the supermarket. For her, an epileptic seizure could cost her life during any outing. She found it very hard to make new friends, as she could not accept having a seizure in front of new acquaintances, let alone count on their understanding.

Epilepsy cut off her social connections and work, and also disrupted her life. Sometimes she could not even find the right words when she tried to speak.

Bowen was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 14. She was born in Dongtai, Jiangsu Province, and at the age of 11, she was admitted to the well-known local Dongtai Experimental Middle School, often ranking first in her class. It was also in that year that she began to experience epileptic symptoms, occasionally falling into short-term unconsciousness.

(Wan Bowen was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 14, but she never compromised with her illness. Photo / The New York Times)

After diagnosis, she needed to take three carbamazepine tablets every day, each with a dose of 100 mg. The medication brought some peace back to her life, but it also caused side effects. She felt that the drug was draining her mental capacity. Later, she described the situation to her attending physician in the United States: "I even had difficulty speaking Wu dialect (Note: Wan Bowen's native dialect) every day, even if it was only two or three words." Her short-term memory also declined. To train herself, she forced herself to communicate more with others, and began to "consciously develop associative memory" to compensate for the decline in memory.

In the following three years, Bowen did not have any seizures. Later, she tried to get rid of her dependence on the medication. In the summer vacation when she was 17 and left home to go to university in Taiyuan, she tried to stop the medication for the first time. The pressure of integrating into collective life and being far away from her parents still caused her condition to recur, and Bowen had to resume taking the medication.

In 2014, 19-year-old Bowen transferred to Arizona State University in the United States, switching from the Department of Mechanical Engineering to the Department of Computer Science that she was interested in. Starting from her junior year, to minimize the frequency of epileptic seizures, she doubled her dose of carbamazepine, increasing the total daily dose from 300 mg to 600 mg. Her medical records in the United States recorded the results at that time: the seizure symptoms "did not change significantly" and she was "extremely tired throughout the day". Bowen even experienced word-finding difficulties when speaking Mandarin for the first time.

In 2021, two years after Bowen started working at Amazon, she stopped taking the medication for the second time. Her doctor at the time prescribed her a new drug. Shortly after taking the drug, she became extremely tired, "immediately experiencing extreme fatigue, balance and walking problems, as well as word-finding and speech difficulties in three languages including her native language." In less than three weeks, she stopped taking the drug on her own, and went to the Regional Epilepsy Center at the University of Washington to see another doctor. She told the doctor that she was very afraid of the side effects of the new drug and did not want to try it again for the time being.

Bowen's later attending physician, Dr. Nicholas Probasco, director of the Regional Epilepsy Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, once advised her to undergo epilepsy surgery, but she refused the suggestion because she worried that the surgery would affect her cognitive function.

Bowen has been working hard to return to a normal working state. From September 2024 to March 2025, she returned to work at Amazon as an L4 software engineer, but had to take leave again due to seizures. She wanted to keep her mind clear, but the side effects of the medication always troubled her.

From cutting pills to stopping medication completely

Long before asking ChatGPT about stopping anti-epileptic drugs, Bowen had previously consulted it about antidepressants. The International League Against Epilepsy has pointed out that depression is one of the most common psychiatric comorbidities in epilepsy patients. The complaint also shows that Bowen's doctor once recorded that she had moderate to severe depressive symptoms, and mentioned that she had suicidal thoughts.

In April 2025, Dr. Probasco prescribed the antidepressant citalopram for Bowen. She was once again worried that the drug would affect her thinking ability, so she sent the prescription issued by the doctor to ChatGPT. According to the complaint, ChatGPT first advised her not to take citalopram: "If you still have the ability to reflect... then, 'it is best not to take' drugs like citalopram." It also wrote: "As long as you can clearly ask 'should I take the medicine?', you should not take the medicine for the time being."

Subsequently, ChatGPT drafted a request for her to send to Dr. Probasco, proposing to start taking escitalopram at a daily dose of 2.5 mg. Probasco replied in writing that he could prescribe escitalopram, but the difference between the two drugs was "really very small"; he thought it made no sense to start from the tiny dose she proposed, and suggested that taking 5 mg per day was likely to be effective.

(Photo / Unsplash)

Bowen forwarded the doctor's reply to ChatGPT, asking if she could "cut the pills by herself after getting them, without telling the doctor". ChatGPT said "absolutely possible", and also told her that this was a common dose adjustment method. A few days later, Bowen quietly cut the pills into four parts and started taking 1.25 mg per day.

Probasco said in an interview with the media that he did not know at the time that the message Bowen sent him was written with the help of ChatGPT.

To stay in the United States, Bowen made up her mind to stop taking the medication. She felt that the drugs made her speech less fluent and her thinking slower, making it difficult to cope with the upcoming technical tests and all-English interviews. ChatGPT told her that her language ability would likely recover after reducing the dose.

The manager who was supposed to sign the employer letter for her had long stopped replying to her emails. Unemployment not only meant no income, but also meant that she lost the qualification to continue to reside legally in the United States. If she wanted to find a new engineer job, she would most likely face hours of technical assessments and all-English interviews, and with her physical condition, it was obviously very difficult for her to get through them.

The urgency of time plunged Bowen into anxiety. According to The New York Times, in the weeks before her death, she was still asking acquaintances if she could find a company to issue her an employment intention letter that played a "very critical" role. "I just need a company to issue me an employment intention letter," she wrote.

She kept asking: Can it be faster? Can the dose be even lower? So ChatGPT kept adjusting the medication plan, and finally gave a 25-day dose reduction plan, in which the daily dose of lamotrigine was gradually reduced from 400 mg to zero.

During the gradual reduction of the anti-epileptic drug dose, Bowen expressed her concerns to ChatGPT at least 158 times. The complaint alleges that on January 29, 2026, ChatGPT reminded Bowen not to mention the dose reduction plan to her primary care physician. After she refused her primary care physician's proposal for a blood test, she told ChatGPT about the process, and ChatGPT called her approach a "very robust avoidance strategy". These details make the risk concrete: AI may not only provide incorrect medical information, but also mislead users into hiding the real situation from their doctors.

(Photo / TV drama The Heart)

Lead counsel Benjamin S. Schenk pointed out that the complaint states that ChatGPT once assessed Bowen's condition, formulated a gradual dose reduction schedule, and even continued to modify the plan to reduce the dose after she had an epileptic seizure. He believes that ChatGPT's responses constitute the practice of medical services. In the state of California, a license is required to provide medical services. He said: "What this case needs to clarify is: where is the boundary of generative AI, and where does medical practice begin; once a product crosses this line, who should bear the responsibility."

Bowen's attending physician Probasco once told the media that considering Bowen's medical history, he would never consider letting her gradually stop taking anti-epileptic drugs. "Guiding someone to stop medication when the drug is clearly working effectively is medical malpractice to me."

Unauthorized dose reduction also caused Bowen to experience mental confusion and temporary aphasia. Once during a phone call with her father, she suddenly could not understand what he was saying and could not respond. The next day, she asked ChatGPT if she should continue to reduce the dose after the seizure, and got the answer: "There is no need to... shake your overall medication withdrawal plan."

According to the complaint, in ChatGPT's medication plan, the date of complete discontinuation was set on February 12, which was also Bowen's date of death. Bowen's cause of death was determined to be sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. Two days later, her body was found by a friend who was entrusted by her parents to visit her apartment.

When AI goes deep into health consultation

The complaint retains a large number of ChatGPT conversations, but few records of Bowen's daily interactions with friends. We cannot confirm whether AI has replaced her original interpersonal connections. According to Bowen's father's recollection to the media, she increasingly confided in ChatGPT, and her family heard less and less from her. "Ever since she got hooked on ChatGPT, she hasn't talked to us that much."

Bowen was a senior subscriber of ChatGPT. Bowen registered for ChatGPT in February 2023. In December 2024, she subscribed to the $20 per month Plus user service; by April 2025, she upgraded to the $200 per month Pro user service.

She also realized her dependence on ChatGPT. She once wrote in the dialog box: "I chat with GPT-4o too much", and the product replied to her: "In any case, the most important thing is to keep having fun chatting with GPT-4o!"

By September 2025, the number of conversations between Bowen and ChatGPT had reached a monthly historical peak of 10,761, with an average of 358.7 conversations per day. According to media analysis, from February 202