On April 12th, Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves issued a statement regarding the Covenant AI incident, saying that 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 also apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident.

Steeves stated that Bittensor's original design was to combat greed and selfishness in human nature by promoting a permissionless mechanism that enables AI to be collectively owned by all participants. 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 protect investors, thereby reducing similar risks. He pointed out that this plan was originally designed with Samuel Dare's participation.

Additionally, he mentioned that the development related to subnet 3, 39, and 81 will continue by the community, and the overall functionality and vision will remain unchanged. 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. The goal is to train a 1 trillion parameter model in the future.