Why did Covenant AI flee from Bittensor?

Original Title: Statement from Covenant AI
Original Author: @covenant_ai
Translation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: Covenant AI released a statement announcing its withdrawal from Bittensor, accusing its co-founder Jacob Steeves (Const) of centralizing power in network governance, including suspending its subnet emissions, revoking community management permissions, and exerting pressure through token sales.

Prior to this, Covenant AI was responsible for the operation of multiple key subnets, covering pre-training, compute scheduling, fine-tuning, and has completed a large-scale language model trained on general-purpose hardware through multi-party collaboration. This achievement has received industry attention and has been mentioned by industry figures such as Jensen Huang and Jack Clark.

The controversy is not one-sided. Some critics have pointed fingers at Covenant AI co-founder Sam Dare, alleging that he sold approximately 37,000 $TAO tokens; while some supporters believe that this conflict may drive the network towards a more community-centric governance model.

On the market front, the $TAO price dropped from around $340 to $286 during the event, then rebounded to $291, accompanied by a significant increase in trading volume.

Discussions around governance structure, power boundaries, and incentive mechanisms are still ongoing.

Below is the original statement:

The establishment of Covenant AI was rooted in a simple yet firm belief: the training of cutting-edge AI models should not be controlled by any single entity.

Over the past two years, our team has been steadfast in pursuing this vision. Covenant-72B — a model with 720 billion parameters trained collaboratively by over 70 independent contributors on commodity hardware without permission — has become the largest decentralized large-scale model pre-training practice in history. It has received recognition from the CEO of NVIDIA, been cited by a co-founder of Anthropic, and has driven a 90% increase in the ecosystem we have helped build.

We have never actively sought attention. We just wanted to prove that decentralized training is feasible. And as the results speak for themselves, attention naturally follows.

We hope the significance of all this is expressed clearly enough.

When a single actor can pause emissions on a subnet, strip node operators of control over their own community spaces, publicly "deprecate" projects without process, and even exert economic pressure through token sales to enforce compliance — it's no longer decentralization, but centralized control wearing a decentralization facade.

Every participant in the ecosystem — miners, validators, and investors — should be aware that this power exists and has been wielded by Jacob Steeves (Const). These actions were not taken to preserve network health, but to reassert control over a team that had become too autonomous and ungovernable. A subnet owner capable of autonomously building a community, making independent decisions, and operating permissionlessly is a threat to those whose authority is based on "everyone must rely on them."

The issue of decentralization goes beyond isolated incidents.

In reality, Bittensor operates on a "triumvirate" — three individuals collectively manage the multisig authority required for network upgrades, packaged as "distributed governance." However, this is far from the truth. It's more akin to a "decentralization theater." Jacob Steeves effectively controls this structure, refuses any substantive power delegation, and unilaterally deploys changes bypassing due process and consensus when deemed appropriate. Other involved parties act more as legal "fall guys" — assuming responsibility and legal risks while the true controller remains hands-off.

While this network constantly discusses governance and decentralization, it has never truly materialized. Power has never left the hands of one person.

This is the crux of the issue.

Bittensor's fundamental promise, key to attracting developers, miners, validators, and investors to this ecosystem, is that it is not controlled by any single entity. However, this promise is not upheld.

In this reality, we can no longer in good conscience continue to build on this network. The foundational statements we made to investors — that this infrastructure is decentralized and permissionless — are contradicted by the actual governance. We cannot fundraise, attract talent, or ask the community to commit resources on a foundation that can be rocked by a single will at any time. We refuse to pass this risk onto those who trust us.

Therefore, with deep disappointment, we have decided to announce that Covenant AI will be exiting the Bittensor network.

Over the past few weeks, Jacob Steeves (aka Const) has taken a series of actions against Covenant AI's operations that are fundamentally at odds with the principles the network purports to uphold. These actions include pausing emissions on our subnet, depriving us of management control over our own community channels, unilaterally declaring our subnet infrastructure "deprecated," and exerting direct economic pressure through large-scale, public token sales during operational conflicts.

These are not governance decisions made through transparent, decentralized consensus, but rather punitive actions exerted by an individual who never truly relinquished control, outwardly claiming to no longer control the network.

The mission of Covenant AI remains unchanged. Decentralized, permissionless AI training is not a feature exclusive to Bittensor but a technical capability we will continue to advance. Our research, team, models, and vision will continue to progress together. We have been advancing some very important new projects and will soon announce developments to the public.

To our community, miners, and all those who have contributed compute, time, and faith to Covenant-72B: you have proven something once thought impossible. This achievement does not belong to a Discord server or hinge on a network's governance structure. It resides within the research itself, the models themselves, and this team. Wherever we go next, we will continue to earn your trust.

Decentralization is not a marketing narrative that can be casually overturned when inconvenient. It is a commitment to every builder, miner, and investor—a commitment that no one can do to others what has been done to us. Either truly achieve decentralization, or stop pretending.

—Sam Dare, Founder of Covenant AI

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