Covenant AI Announces Exit from Bittensor Network, Claims Its Decentralization Promise Is Hollow

Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, announced that Covenant AI has officially exited the Bittensor network. Previously, Covenant AI completed the largest decentralized LLM pretraining project in history—Covenant-72B (a 72-billion-parameter model developed by over 70 independent contributors)—which drew attention from NVIDIA’s CEO and was cited by an Anthropic co-founder. In its statement, Covenant AI accused the Bittensor network of long concentrating actual control in the hands of co-founder Jacob Steeves (“Const”), rendering the so-called “three-signature multisig governance” merely a theatrical performance of decentralization, with real power never truly distributed. Recently, Jacob Steeves unilaterally imposed punitive measures against Covenant AI, including: suspending its subnet earnings, revoking its community channel moderation privileges, unilaterally deprecating its subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure via 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 progress—will be publicly announced shortly.