Covenant AI Announces Exit from Bittensor Network, Questions Governance Centralization

Covenant AI Exits Bittensor, Accuses Network of 'Decentralization Theater'

Covenant AI is leaving the Bittensor network. The team accused Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves of effectively controlling the network, calling its much-touted decentralization just "decentralization theater."

Covenant AI said its team completed a permissionless training run for its Covenant-72B model—a 72-billion-parameter LLM—over the past two years. It was the largest decentralized LLM pre-training run ever, earning recognition from Nvidia's CEO and a citation from Anthropic's co-founder. But recently, Steeves took several actions against the team, including suspending subnet emissions, revoking community channel permissions, unilaterally deprecating subnet infrastructure, and exerting economic pressure by selling large amounts of tokens at strategic times.

Covenant AI argued that Bittensor's "three-person multisig" structure isn't decentralized governance. Steeves, they said, maintains effective control and deploys changes unilaterally. The team said it will continue its research into decentralized AI training.