Bittensor Co-founder Accuses Covenant AI Founder of Betraying Community, Proposes "Locked Staking" Mechanism to Strengthen Governance

Odaily reported that Bittensor co-founder Jacob Robert Steeves has issued a response regarding the Covenant AI incident. He stated that the events of the past few days have left him "deeply shaken" and accused Covenant AI founder Samuel Dare of causing severe harm to the protocol and its community through his actions, betraying the trust of investors and users. He betrayed everyone. Steeves also apologized to users who suffered losses due to the incident.

Steeves explained that Bittensor was designed from the outset to counteract human greed and selfishness, aiming to promote AI ownership by all participants through a permissionless mechanism. He emphasized that while this incident exposed vulnerabilities in the system, it will also drive the protocol and community to further enhance their resilience against risks.

Regarding future directions, Steeves proposed advancing a "Locked Stake" mechanism. This would introduce a dimension of commitment based on "time + staking" at the protocol layer to improve transparency and investor protection, thereby reducing similar risks. He noted that this proposal was originally co-designed with Samuel Dare.

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. The project will continue to advance the development of open AI and plans to move towards training larger-scale models in the future, including a model with 1 trillion parameters.