Editor’s Note: Covenant AI has issued a statement announcing its withdrawal from Bittensor, accusing its co-founder Jacob Steeves (Const) of centralizing power in network governance, including suspending subnet emissions, revoking community management privileges, and exerting pressure through token sales.
Previously, Covenant AI managed the operation of multiple critical subnets, covering pre-training, compute scheduling, and fine-tuning, and successfully trained a large language model through collaborative efforts on general-purpose hardware. This achievement garnered industry attention and was mentioned by industry leaders such as Jensen Huang and Jack Clark.
The controversy is not one-sided. Some critics have targeted Sam Dare, founder of Covenant AI, accusing him of selling approximately 37,000 $TAO tokens; others argue that this conflict may push the network toward a more community-driven governance model.
On the market level, the price of $TAO dropped from approximately $340 to $286 during the event's escalation, then recovered to $291, accompanied by a significant increase in trading volume.
Discussions on governance structure, boundaries of power, and incentive mechanisms continue.
The following is the original text:
Covenant AI was founded on 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 bringing this vision to life. Covenant-72B—a 72-billion-parameter model trained collaboratively by over 70 independent contributors on commodity hardware without permission—has become the largest decentralized large model pre-training effort in history. It has been recognized by NVIDIA’s CEO, cited by Anthropic’s co-founder, and contributed to a 90% increase in the ecosystem we helped build.
We never sought attention deliberately. We simply wanted to prove that decentralized training is feasible—and when the results speak for themselves, attention naturally follows.
We hope to make the meaning of all of this clear enough.
When a single actor can halt the emission of a subnet, strip node owners of control over their own community space, publicly "deprecate" projects without process, or exert economic pressure through token sales to force compliance—this is no longer decentralization, but centralized control disguised as decentralization.
Every participant in the ecosystem—miners, validators, and investors—should recognize that this power truly exists and has already been exercised by Jacob Steeves (Const). These actions were not taken to safeguard the health of the network, but rather to reassert control over a team that had become too independent and difficult to manage. A subnet owner capable of autonomously building a community, making independent decisions, and operating without permission poses a direct threat to those whose power relies on the belief that everyone must depend on them.
The issue of decentralization extends beyond isolated incidents.
Bittensor operates on what is marketed as a “triadic structure”—three individuals jointly hold the multisignature authority required for network upgrades, packaged as “decentralized governance.” But this is not the reality. It is more accurately a “decentralized performance.” Jacob Steeves retains actual control over this structure, refuses to enact any meaningful decentralization of power, and unilaterally deploys changes, bypassing processes and consensus whenever he deems appropriate. The other parties involved serve merely as legal “shields”—assuming responsibility and facing litigation risk, while the true controller remains insulated from accountability.
This network constantly talks about governance and decentralization but has never truly implemented them. Power has never left the hands of one person.
This is precisely the core of the issue.
Bittensor's fundamental promise—the key premise attracting developers, miners, verifiers, and investors to its ecosystem—is that it is not controlled by any single entity. But this promise is not real.
Under these circumstances, we can no longer responsibly continue building on this network. Our foundational claims to investors—that this infrastructure is decentralized and permissionless—contradict the actual governance model. We cannot raise funds, attract talent, or ask the community to invest resources on a foundation that could be undermined at any moment by a single will. We are unwilling to shift this risk onto those who trust us.
Therefore, although deeply disappointed, we have decided to announce that Covenant AI will be exiting the Bittensor network.
Over the past several weeks, Jacob Steeves (aka Const) has taken a series of actions against Covenant AI’s operations that are fundamentally incompatible with the principles the network claims to uphold. These include suspending our subnet’s emissions, revoking our administrative control over our own community channels, unilaterally declaring our subnet infrastructure “deprecated,” and applying direct economic pressure through large-scale, public token sales at critical moments of operational conflict.
These are not governance decisions made through transparent, decentralized consensus, but rather punitive actions imposed by someone who never truly relinquished control, while publicly claiming no longer to be in charge of the network.
Covenant AI's mission remains unchanged. Decentralized, permissionless AI training is not exclusive to Bittensor—it is a technological capability we will continue to advance. Our research, team, models, and vision will move forward together. We are already advancing several important new projects and will share updates with the public soon.
To our community, miners, and everyone who has contributed compute, time, and belief to Covenant-72B: You have proven something once thought impossible. This achievement does not belong to any Discord server or depend on any network’s governance structure—it exists in the research itself, in the model itself, and within this team. No matter where we go next, we will continue to earn your trust.
Decentralization is not a marketing narrative that can be casually discarded when inconvenient. It is a promise to every builder, miner, and investor—a promise that no one will ever subject others to what we have endured. Either truly achieve decentralization, or stop pretending.
— Founder of Sam Dare Covenant AI