BlockBeats News, April 10th, the decentralized AI training team Covenant AI issued a public statement, formally announcing its withdrawal from the Bittensor network, and directly named the network’s key figure Jacob Steeves (alias Const), accusing him of systemic betrayal of decentralized commitments.
Covenant AI founder Sam Dare revealed that Const recently took a series of suppressive actions against his team: suspending token emissions for its subnetwork, depriving them of management rights to their community channels, unilaterally decommissioning subnetwork infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure through large-scale, high-exposure token sell-offs during the conflict.
Covenant AI bluntly stated that the “three-person multi-signature governance” touted by Bittensor is essentially a “decentralized theater” — Const effectively controls the multisig, can unilaterally implement changes bypassing consensus, and other participants are merely legal liability shields. The statement was sharp: “The entire core promise of Bittensor — that no single entity can control it — is a lie.”
The withdrawal statement did not come from a disgruntled party: Covenant AI previously completed the largest decentralized LLM pre-training project in history, Covenant-72B (720 billion parameters, involving 70+ independent contributors), publicly recognized by NVIDIA’s CEO and cited by a co-founder of Anthropic, leading to a 90% increase in related ecosystem tokens’ value.
Covenant AI stated that the team, research achievements, and models will be taken away entirely, and hinted at an upcoming announcement of a new project.
