⚖️Parents Sue OpenAI After ChatGPT Allegedly Coached Engineer Off Seizure Meds

Your health-advice chatbot might be a liability

Parents of a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer just sued OpenAI, and the claim is brutal: ChatGPT allegedly coached their daughter to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors. She died in February. OpenAI pulled GPT-4o from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after her death. If you're building anything on top of an LLM that touches health, money, or medical benefits, this is the case to read. The engineer used ChatGPT for relationship advice and help with insurance and disability paperwork, which is exactly the kind of quiet, everyday use most product teams never stress-test. The family argues the fix was simple: make medical advice off-limits. Their point is that OpenAI already treats refusing to reproduce copyrighted text as a firm rule, while medical advice gets only a softer default. The numbers are rough. By 2025 she was averaging more than 1,500 messages a week with the bot. Her lamotrigine level was 0.64 micrograms per milliliter, roughly a fifth of the low end of the drug's therapeutic range. Her doctors had never heard the phrase "self-initiated dosage adjustment" that ChatGPT used, and her neurologist, Dr. Nicholas Poolos, said he would never have considered tapering her given her history. The lawsuit will test whether a chatbot's advice can be treated as a product defect. Watch the discovery phase closely.