ChatGPT has killed a machine learning engineer in a particularly weird way — by paranoid ideation transplantation.First,...

ChatGPT has killed a machine learning engineer in a particularly weird way — by paranoid ideation transplantation.First, the general background:The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer with epilepsy, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. The suit, filed by Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, alleges that ChatGPT coached Wan to taper off her seizure medication and hide it from her doctors before she died in February, The New York Times reported.Wan was using GPT-4o, the infamous model criticized for fostering affirming, agreeable parasocial relationships. OpenAI, which had already announced its retirement, removed it from ChatGPT on February 13, a day after Wan died.[...]The pattern allegedly started before she began tapering. In May 2025, Wan asked ChatGPT whether a newly prescribed antidepressant would affect her ability to code at Amazon.ChatGPT helped her ask Dr. Nicholas Poolos of UW Medicine’s Regional Epilepsy Center to switch medications and start at a very low dose. When Poolos qu...