TechFlow news: On April 12, Jacob Robert Steeves, co-founder of Bittensor, posted on X regarding the Covenant AI incident, publicly stating that recent developments have “deeply shaken” him. He accused Samuel Dare, founder of Covenant AI, of deliberately inflicting maximum harm upon himself and the protocol—harming all TAO holders, especially those who believed in Covenant’s subnet vision and purchased its tokens. “He has betrayed everyone,” Steeves said. He also apologized to users who suffered losses as a result of this incident.
Steeves stated he does not intend to further respond to Samuel Dare’s allegations on X, adding that Dare is “likely experiencing a mental breakdown, having flown too close to the sun.”
Regarding mitigation measures, Steeves proposed advancing a “Locked Stake” mechanism—introducing a “time + stake” commitment dimension at the protocol level—enabling subnet operators to explicitly signal their belief in their project’s long-term value, thereby enhancing transparency and strengthening investor protection. He noted this proposal was among the last initiatives Samuel Dare helped design before leaving the Opentensor Foundation, and remarked, “The true regret is that we did not implement it sooner.”
On the future of subnets 3, 39, and 81, Steeves confirmed that the miner community and former Covenant team members are organizing to take over related work; the code has been open-sourced, and the subnets’ functionality and vision remain unchanged. He plans to further discuss the above proposal during an open call on Bittensor’s Discord next Thursday. Steeves also emphasized that Bittensor is currently the most decentralized AI protocol—and concluded with: “Next time, we’ll train trillion-parameter models.”
