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

ME News message, April 12 (UTC+8): Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves responded to the Covenant AI incident in a post, saying the events of the past few days have “deeply shaken” him, and accusing 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 is to counter greed and selfishness in human nature, and to promote shared ownership of AI by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident has exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it will also drive the protocol and community to further enhance their resilience to risks.

Regarding the future direction, Steeves proposed advancing a “Locked Stake” mechanism, introducing a commitment dimension of “time + staking” at the protocol level to improve transparency and protect investors, and to reduce similar risks. He pointed out that this scheme was originally designed with Samuel Dare’s participation. In addition, he said that development related to subnets 3, 39, and 81 will continue to be carried out by the community, and the overall functionality and vision will not change.

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 toward training larger-scale models. In the future, they will train a 1 trillion parameter model. (Source: ChainCatcher)