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

ME News message, on April 12 (UTC+8), Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves posted a response regarding the Covenant AI incident. He said that the events of the past few days have “deeply shaken” him, and accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of causing serious harm to the protocol and the community, betraying everyone. He also apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident.

Steeves said that Bittensor’s original design is to combat greed and selfishness in human nature, and to promote collective ownership of AI by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it will also prompt the protocol and community to further enhance their risk-resilience capabilities.

Regarding future direction, Steeves proposed moving forward with a “Locked Stake” mechanism, introducing a “time + staking” commitment dimension at the protocol level to improve transparency and investor protection, and to reduce risks like this. He pointed out that this plan was originally developed with Samuel Dare’s involvement.

In addition, he said that development related to subnet 3, 39, and 81 will continue to be carried out by the community, and that the overall functionality and vision will not change. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor is still one of the most decentralized AI protocols today, and that it will continue to promote open AI development, with plans to move toward training larger-scale models. The future goal is to train a 1 trillion-parameter model. (Source: ChainCatcher)