TechFlow News, April 10: Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, announced that Covenant AI has officially exited the Bittensor network.
Covenant AI previously completed the largest decentralized LLM pretraining project in history—Covenant-72B (a 72-billion-parameter model developed by over 70 independent contributors). The project attracted attention from NVIDIA’s CEO and was cited by an Anthropic co-founder.
In its statement, Covenant AI accused the Bittensor network of long-term centralized control vested solely in co-founder Jacob Steeves (“Const”). It claimed that the so-called “three-signature multi-sig governance” was merely a façade for decentralization, with real authority never meaningfully distributed. Recently, Jacob Steeves unilaterally imposed punitive measures against Covenant AI, including: suspending its subnet rewards; revoking its community channel moderation privileges; unilaterally deprecating its subnet infrastructure; and exerting economic pressure through large-scale token dumping during the ongoing conflict between the two parties.
Covenant AI stated it cannot continue fundraising, recruiting talent, or soliciting community resources on a network where the promise of “decentralization” can be unilaterally revoked by a single individual. Its research outcomes, team, and models will depart alongside the team, and a new project—including related updates—will be publicly announced shortly.
