Bowen Wan had told ChatGPT in her conversations that she had begun considering the AI chat box as “a friend.”
By Catholics for Catholics
Bowen Wan was speaking to her father on the phone when she abruptly stopped talking.
Wan appeared to have a seizure — a malady she’d struggled with for years — but this one looked to continue longer than usual, her dad noticed. When she recovered, she said she’d talk more later, after she’d rested.
But that did not happen. Days later, Wan ceased answering calls. Her parents, who reside in China, had someone go look after her, according to a story by the Daily Wire.
Qun Wan and his wife said they saw via video call as a friend discovered the 31-year-old software engineer dead in her Seattle apartment.
The family of Wan, 31, who died after tapering off her epilepsy medication is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming that ChatGPT counseled her to make the changes and hide them from her doctors.
According to the Daily Wire, the suit contends that Bowen Wan — who had epilepsy but had been handling symptoms with prescription medication — had been asking ChatGPT in the weeks prior to her death about ways to leave her medication without her doctors’ knowledge. The New York Times, which reviewed her chat logs, detailed the exchanges and interviewed her parents and doctor.
Her ChatGPT history revealed questions she’d sent the chatbot — as far back as 2023 — about everything from relationships to her health insurance and disability benefits.
Wan’s prior seizure medication had all of a sudden ceased working before she went on disability leave in 2021, and she’d started having seizures so frequently that she barely left her house. By 2025, her health had improved considerably on a new medication — lowering her seizures to just a few each month — but her ChatGPT use had also soared to more than 1,500 messages a week.
“I don’t know why, but sometimes when we chat, no matter what it’s about, I’ve started to see you as a friend,” she wrote in March of 2025.
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