July 14, 2026
(Juneau, AK) – Acting Attorney General Cori Mills today joined a coalition of 42 attorneys general announcing a settlement with the bankruptcy trustee for 23andMe, resolving allegations stemming from a 2023 data breach that compromised the genetic data of 6.9 million customers worldwide, including 19,541 Alaskans. The settlement includes $150 million in allowed claims for states. Due to the finite amount of funds in the bankruptcy estate and numerous other claims, recovery is limited to $18 million but will be paid out of available bankruptcy funds immediately to states based in part on the number of affected customers. Of the $18 million, Alaska will receive $165,447. In addition, 23andMe agreed to a $46.75 million class-action settlement in the bankruptcy to provide relief to affected U.S. consumers who submitted claims by Feb. 17, 2026.
“Alaskans who use genetic testing businesses like 23andMe are trusting these companies with their most sensitive personal information,” said Acting Alaska Attorney General Cori Mills. “They should be confident that this information will not end up in the wrong hands.”
In Oct. 2023, direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe announced that it had discovered a data breach in which 6.9 million consumers were affected. This data breach exposed a wide range of data about 23andMe customers, including in some cases genetic ancestry information, and subsets of this data were subsequently published for sale on the dark web.
23andMe learned about the breach months after impacted personal information was publicly available. 23andMe first denied a breach and then, once it confirmed the breach, blamed consumers for how their accounts were set up or how passwords were used. 23andMe initially accepted no responsibility for the credential stuffing breach, which was particularly egregious considering 23andMe’s partnership with MyHeritage, which itself was compromised years prior to the breach, exposing thousands of credentials shared between the websites.
In the immediate aftermath of the data breach, the Attorneys General formed a multistate investigation and found that 23andMe engaged in unreasonable data security practices, including, but not limited to:
- Failing to employ safeguards against credential stuffing attacks, including comparing passwords against blocklists of known breached passwords or requiring multifactor authentication;
- Failing to implement appropriate rate limiting or intrusion prevention;
- Failing to implement logging and monitoring or other tools likely to detect a data breach;
- Failing to appropriately investigate and/or address unusual login in patterns, including, for example, a massive spike in login attempts;
- Failing to remediate known vulnerabilities; and
- Failing to properly review and test design features.
In March 2025, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy protection, and states subsequently filed claims related to the data breach investigation. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, the assets – notably 23andMe’s consumer data – were sold to TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit formed by 23andMe founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki. The terms of the sale included many information and data security requirements that likely would have been included in a settlement with 23andMe had it not filed for bankruptcy. Such terms included enhanced data security requirements, appropriate risk analysis, the addition of an Advisory Board, agreeing to be bound by comprehensive privacy laws without exception, and continuing to offer consumer deletion rights. These terms will make sure that TTAM Research Institute, now reregistered as 23andMe Research Institute, will be a safer custodian of genetic data moving forward.
In addition to general consumer protection and privacy laws, individuals are also protected under Alaska’s genetic privacy law, which makes it illegal for a person to transfer genetic data without the informed written consent of the person whose genes the data reflects.
Acting Attorney General Mills joined the attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia in today’s settlement.
The State encourages any person who believes they were subjected to unfair or deceptive business practices to submit a complaint to the Consumer Protection Unit.
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Department Media Contact: Information Officer Sam Curtis at sam.curtis@alaska.gov or (907) 269-6269.
Due to resource constraints, we no longer post links to referenced records. Records filed in a federal court are readily available at Docket Search or PACER, and records filed in a State of Alaska court are readily available from the Alaska Court System (Trial Courts - Alaska Court System and Search for an Appellate Case). Contact Sam Curtis to request a referenced record that is not readily available from a court or on the internet, or contact law.recordsrequest@alaska.gov to submit a formal Alaska Public Records Act request.
