Covenant AI announces withdrawal from the Bittensor network, claiming its decentralization promise is unfulfilled

Deep Tide TechFlow News, April 10, Covenant AI founder Sam Dare posted to disclose that Covenant AI has officially announced its exit from the Bittensor network. Covenant AI previously completed the largest decentralized LLM pre-training project in history—Covenant-72B (72 billion parameters, with over 70 independent contributors)—and it drew attention from NVIDIA’s CEO and was cited by the co-founder of Anthropic.

In its statement, Covenant AI alleged that actual control of the Bittensor network has long been concentrated solely in the hands of co-founder Jacob Steeves (Const), and that the so-called “three-party multi-sign governance” is merely a performance of decentralization, with real power never truly being distributed. Recently, Jacob Steeves took a series of unilateral punitive actions against Covenant AI, including: pausing its subnet revenue, revoking its community channel management permissions, unilaterally discontinuing its subnet infrastructure, and imposing economic pressure through large-scale token sell-offs during the period of conflict between the two parties.

Covenant AI said it is unable to continue raising funds, recruiting talent, or soliciting resources from the community on a network where a “decentralized” commitment can be overturned by a single person at any time. Its research results, team, and models will leave together with the team, and it will soon announce new projects and related progress.