Bittensor co-founders accuse Covenant AI founder of betraying the community, planning to introduce a lock-up staking mechanism

ME News Report, April 12 (UTC+8), Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves responded to the Covenant AI incident, stating that the events of the past few days have “deeply shaken” him, and accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare’s actions of causing serious harm to the protocol and community, betraying the trust of investors and users. He apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident. Steeves said that Bittensor’s original design was to combat greed and selfishness in human nature, promoting AI ownership collectively by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that although this incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it will also push the protocol and community to further enhance their resilience. Regarding future directions, Steeves proposed advancing a “Locked Stake” mechanism, introducing a “time + staking” commitment dimension at the protocol level to improve transparency and investor protection, and reduce similar risks. He pointed out that this plan was originally designed with Samuel Dare’s involvement. Additionally, he stated that the development of subnet 3, 39, and 81 will continue by the community, with no change to the overall functionality and vision. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor remains one of the most decentralized AI protocols today, and will continue to promote open AI development, with plans to move towards training larger-scale models. In the future, they aim to train a 1 trillion parameter model. (Source: ChainCatcher)