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

On April 12, Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves responded to the Covenant AI incident, stating that the events of the past few days had "deeply shaken" him. He accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of severely damaging the protocol and community, betraying the trust of investors and users, and abetting everyone. He also apologized to users who suffered losses as a result of the incident. Steves stated that Bittensor was designed to combat greed and selfishness in human nature, promoting AI ownership by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident exposed system vulnerabilities, it will also prompt the protocol and community to further strengthen their resilience. Regarding future directions, Steeves proposed advancing the "Locked Stake" mechanism, introducing a "time + staking" commitment dimension at the protocol layer to improve transparency and investor protection, and reduce similar risks. He pointed out that this solution was originally designed with Samuel Dare's assistance. Furthermore, he stated that development related to subnets 3, 39, and 81 will continue to be driven by the community, and the overall functionality and vision will remain unchanged. Steeves emphasized that Bittensor remains one of the most decentralized AI protocols currently available, and will continue to promote the development of open AI in the future, with plans to move towards larger-scale model training. The future goal is to train a model with one trillion parameters.