After the 23andMe bankruptcy: who owns your DNA now, and what to do with your file

The headlines said "23andMe sold your DNA." The truth is more specific, and the specifics decide what you should do next. Here is the ownership chain, dated and sourced, followed by the two practical steps that are entirely in your control: download your file, and then decide whether to delete your account.

What actually happened

On 23 March 2025, 23andMe Holding Co. and eleven affiliated entities filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Anne Wojcicki resigned as CEO; the CFO, Joe Selsavage, was appointed interim CEO. The company said it would keep operating while it ran a court-supervised sale — meaning its largest asset, a database of roughly fifteen million genetic profiles, was now for sale.

After a first auction named Regeneron ($256M) the winning bidder, the court reopened bidding. On 13 June 2025 the estate agreed to sell to TTAM Research Institute — a California non-profit founded and led by Wojcicki — for $305 million. The court approved the sale on 27 June 2025, and it closed on 14 July 2025.

The distinction the headlines miss

Two different entities came out of this, and conflating them is the single most common error in the coverage:

• TTAM Research Institute bought the operating consumer service (Personal Genome Service) and the research business. Your account and your data are with TTAM. The service continues under its ownership.
• Chrome Holding Co. is what the leftover bankruptcy estate was renamed (23andMe Holding Co. → Chrome Holding Co.; 23andMe, Inc. → ChromeCo, Inc.). This is the shell that carries the pre-sale company's legal liabilities — it is not the thing operating your account.

So when you read that "California sued 23andMe in May 2026," the defendant is Chrome Holding Co., f/k/a 23andMe — the pre-sale estate, over conduct in 2023 — not the TTAM non-profit now running the service. Both facts are true; they're about different companies.

The dated record

The table below is the chronology we rely on. Where a number is disputed, we say so and give the range rather than pick the scariest figure.

Reader beware: some widely-repeated figures (a single hard breach count; a claimable settlement) are either contested or out of date. We've flagged both above.

What the new owner promised

As a condition of the sale, a coalition of state attorneys general extracted binding privacy commitments from TTAM. Per the Missouri Attorney General, these include: emailing every customer at least two business days before closing; a three-person advisory board with privacy, bioethics and cybersecurity expertise; two years of free Experian identity-theft monitoring; and a requirement that any future sale of the genetic data must carry the same privacy commitments forward.

What we won't claim

We can't independently confirm, as of this review date, that the advisory board has been seated or that the Experian monitoring has actually reached every eligible customer. Treat those as promised, not verified. A promise that survives one bankruptcy is still a promise made by a going concern — which is exactly the structural risk the whole episode exposed.

Step 1 — download your file first

Whatever you decide about your account, export your raw data before you touch the delete button. Deletion can take days and is irreversible; there is no undo. In your 23andMe account, open Settings, scroll to the 23andMe Data section, and download at minimum the Raw data (the uninterpreted genotype file — this is the one worth keeping). The Reports Summary and Ancestry Composition are the company's interpretations; the raw file is yours and is what any other service can re-read. Store it somewhere private.

Step 2 — delete, if you want to — but know what "delete" means

Deletion is real, and worth doing if you don't want your profile in any future dataset. It is not, however, absolute. Based on 23andMe's own account-closure terms and independent guidance (the EFF's step-by-step guide is the clearest):

• Requesting deletion also authorises destruction of any stored saliva sample.
• The company retains some information it is legally required to keep — for lab-regulation compliance it holds a minimal record (such as sex and date of birth) and keeps a record of the deletion request itself.
• Data already used in completed or in-flight research can't be pulled back out; deletion stops future use, not past use.

You confirm the request by clicking a link 23andMe emails you — deletion doesn't complete until you do. None of this is a reason not to delete; it's a reason to download first and to be clear-eyed about what remains.

Step 3 — what to do with the file you already own

Here's the part most of the coverage skips: once you've downloaded your raw data, you own a genetic file that doesn't expire. It's the same input a clinical lab or a re-analysis service reads. The genotyping chip captured a fixed set of positions in 2018 or 2021 — but the databases that interpret those positions (ClinVar, ACMG, CPIC) move every month. The most useful thing you can do with the file is re-read it against current evidence, on your terms.

That is what Aimosti is for. We don't take a new sample or hold a copy of your genome to be sold in some future bankruptcy — we re-analyse the file you already own, in the EU, and hand back an attributed report. Pick your starting point:

• What to do with your 23andMe raw data — the re-analysis walkthrough, and an honest account of what a chip file can and can't show.
• AncestryDNA raw data and MyHeritage raw data — same idea, different export path.
• Looking for a 23andMe alternative? — how a re-analysis service that never holds your genome compares.
• Our data & security architecture — where your file lives, and how little of it we keep.

Primary sources: Kroll bankruptcy docket · Missouri AG (privacy terms) · TTAM acquisition close · California AG suit · EFF deletion guide · breach settlement.