Covenant AI Announces Departure from Bittensor: Decentralization is a Lie, One Person Controls the Whole Network

April 10 — Covenant AI, a decentralized AI training team, formally announced its departure from the Bittensor network Wednesday, directly calling out the protocol’s key figure Jacob Steeves (aka Const) for systematically betraying its decentralized promise. Covenant AI founder Sam Dare revealed Const recently took punitive actions against his team: pausing token emissions for its subnets, stripping the team of community channel management rights, unilaterally decommissioning subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure via large-scale, high-profile token dumps amid the conflict. The team bluntly labeled Bittensor’s touted “three-person multisig governance” as “decentralization theater”: Const effectively controls the multisig, can unilaterally bypass consensus to push through changes at any time, and other participants serve only as legal liability shields. “The entire core promise of Bittensor — that no single entity could control it — is a lie,” the statement said. This exit is not from disgruntled individuals: Covenant AI previously delivered the largest decentralized LLM pretraining project to date, Covenant-72B (720 billion parameters, with over 70 independent contributors). The model was publicly recognized by NVIDIA’s CEO, cited by Anthropic’s co-founder, and drove a 90% surge in the associated ecosystem token. Covenant AI stated it will retain its team, research, and models, and teased an upcoming new project announcement.