Covenant AI announced its withdrawal from the Bittensor network, raising questions about its centralized governance.

Odaily Odaily that Covenant AI has issued a statement announcing its withdrawal from the Bittensor network and questioning its governance structure. The statement claims that despite Bittensor's claims of decentralization, actual governance power remains concentrated in the hands of a few, and related decision-making lacks transparent processes and community consensus. Covenant AI stated that its subnet operations have recently encountered measures including suspension of revenue distribution, adjustments to community management permissions, and infrastructure changes, which it believes are inconsistent with decentralized principles. The team stated that it will continue to advance decentralized AI training and conduct subsequent research and development and project deployment in other environments. Covenant AI, formerly known as Templar, is a well-known sub-network project within the Bittensor ecosystem. In the past few months, it completed the training of the Covenant-72B model, which boasts 72 billion parameters and was pre-trained by over 70 independent contributors on general-purpose hardware. It is considered one of the largest decentralized LLM pre-training practices to date and has received public recognition from the CEO of Nvidia and the co-founder of Anthropic. The team stated that it will continue to advance decentralized AI training and conduct further research in other environments.