- Covenant AI said it is leaving Bittensor because the network’s governance no longer reflects its stated commitment to decentralization.
- Founder Sam Dare said the split was driven by a loss of trust in how power is exercised inside the ecosystem.
Covenant AI is leaving Bittensor, and the company is framing the decision as a break over principle rather than a routine ecosystem dispute.
In a statement published on X, founder Sam Dare said Covenant can no longer continue building on Bittensor because the network’s governance structure contradicts the decentralization it publicly claims to uphold. The language was sharp and plainly intentional.
Dare said the promise that no single entity controls the network was the core idea that brought builders, miners, validators and investors into the ecosystem, then added that this promise had proved false.
Covenant says the core premise no longer holds
That is a serious accusation, especially coming from one of the better-known teams on the network. Covenant said it had spent its time on Bittensor working from the belief that AI model training should not sit under the control of a single party.
The team pointed to Covenant-72B, which it described as the largest decentralized instance of LLM pre-training ever run, as proof that it had followed through on that vision in practice.
That work also made Covenant one of the most visible and important subnets in the Bittensor ecosystem. So this is not a fringe project walking away quietly. It is a prominent builder saying the governance reality no longer matches the founding narrative.
The departure centers on control, not product failure
Dare identified Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves, also known as Const, as the central reason for the departure. According to the statement, Steeves had been asserting authority over the subnet in an effort to regain control of Covenant after it had grown beyond what the team believed could be centrally managed.
That shifts the focus of the story away from token price reactions and back to the more consequential issue. Covenant is not leaving because its product failed or because the market turned. It is leaving because it no longer believes Bittensor operates according to the decentralization standard that justified building there in the first place.
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