On April 10th, as the main subnet developer on Bittensor, Covenant AI announced on Thursday that it will exit this AI-focused network ecosystem. Covenant AI founder Sam Dare stated in a message on the X platform that due to the network's governance mechanism conflicting with its claimed decentralization promise, the company cannot continue development on Bittensor.

"All of Bittensor's premise—that is, the promise to attract developers, miners, validators, and investors to join the ecosystem—is that no single entity can control it," Dare wrote. "That promise is a lie."

The Covenant founder said that the team has always upheld the belief that "AI model training should not be controlled by a single entity," and has demonstrated this mission by building Covenant-72B as the largest-ever decentralized large language model (LLM) pretraining case. These efforts have made Covenant one of the most prominent subnets on Bittensor.

Despite its success, Covenant has decided to exit the network, citing Bittensor co-founder Jacob Steeves as a key reason for its departure.

Dare claimed in the statement that Steeves (also known as Const) has been exercising authority over the subnet, attempting to regain control after Covenant grew to an unmanageable scale.

The Block has contacted Bittensor co-founder for further comment.