Covenant AI Withdraws from Bittensor Network Amid Allegations

On April 10, Covenant AI announced its withdrawal from the Bittensor network, accusing key figure Jacob Steeves, known online as Const, of betraying the network's decentralization promises. According to BlockBeats, Covenant AI founder Sam Dare revealed that Const had taken several actions against the team, including halting token emissions for their subnet, revoking management rights to their community channels, discontinuing subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure through large-scale token sales during conflicts. Covenant AI criticized Bittensor's governance model, describing it as a "decentralization theater" where Const effectively controls the multi-signature process, bypassing consensus and using other participants as legal shields. The statement strongly condemned Bittensor's core promise of being uncontrollable by any single entity as a falsehood. The withdrawal is not a result of failure, as Covenant AI previously completed the largest decentralized LLM pre-training project, Covenant-72B, involving over 70 independent contributors. This project received public recognition from NVIDIA's CEO and was cited by Anthropic's co-founder, contributing to a 90% increase in related ecosystem tokens. Covenant AI plans to take its team, research, and models with them and has hinted at upcoming announcements for new projects.