“I’m Not Upset or Afraid” — Const Responds to Covenant AI’s Departure

When the dust settles on a crisis, the first thing people look for is tone. Not just what the person in charge says, but how they say it. Whether they sound rattled. Whether they sound like someone managing a disaster or someone who saw it coming.

Const did not sound rattled. In an interview with @taooutsider, recorded in the immediate aftermath of Covenant AI’s departure, Const spoke with the cadence of someone who had already moved past the explosion and was working through the rebuild. No defensiveness nor visible anger, but a founder mapping out the next 72 hours.

The Priorities: Revive, Reform, Rebut

Asked directly what he would be working on in the days ahead, Const laid out three tracks, in order.

First, and most urgently: the subnets. Covenant AI operated Subnet 3 (Templar), Subnet 39 (Basilica), and Subnet 81 (Grail) — the pre-training, compute, and fine-tuning layers that together formed the backbone of Bittensor’s most celebrated AI work. With Sam gone, those subnets need new operators. Const said the immediate priority is finding developers who were already part of the Covenant team, shifting stake to their keys, and letting them resume running validation. The goal is continuity, not a clean-slate restart.

What are you going to be working on in the next few days as a priority? And would you like to leave a message for every alpha holder who believes in what is being built? — @taooutsider asked

“The highest priority is going to be reviving those projects in some way. Either finding developers that were in the team to continue the project by shifting stake to their keys and letting them run the validation. That’s highly important.” — Const

Second, on a longer timeline: new mechanisms. Const referenced ideas that had been discussed previously within the Bittensor team — governance structures designed to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral exit. He was candid that this is not a quick fix. Implementation would take weeks to months, and he emphasized doing it carefully rather than rushing out a patch in the heat of a crisis. This aligns with what he posted on X earlier about “lock-based subnet ownership,” a system where a team’s control of a subnet would be tied to their long-term economic commitment, giving investors advance visibility if an owner begins unlocking tokens.

Third: the narrative. Const acknowledged that the FUD unleashed by Dare’s statement needs to be addressed directly. He pointed to his earlier rebuttals on X, where he disputed each of Covenant’s claims point by point, and signaled that more clarification would follow.

Check the full rebuttal below:

“A Spring Forward Moment”

The most revealing part of the interview was the framing.

Const did not treat the Covenant exit as a wound to be managed. He treated it as a catalyst. His phrase, “a spring forward moment”, carries a specific weight in the context of a community that just watched an important subnet through the door.

“I actually think this is a spring forward moment. This is actually an opportunity to get more attention with the good things we are doing. I’m not really upset or afraid.”

The logic, stripped down, is this: Covenant AI’s departure exposes a class of vulnerability that Bittensor needed to confront eventually: the risk of a subnet owner extracting value and walking away. By confronting it now, in public, under maximum scrutiny, the network can build mechanisms that make such exits either impossible or economically self-defeating. The community gets stronger because it got hit.

It is the same argument he made in his X posts, where he thanked Sam for “helping further Bittensor’s decentralization.”

What is clear is that Const is not treating this as a jeopardy. He is treating it as a firmware upgrade. For the alpha and $TAO holders, that is exactly the reassurance they needed.

Full interview:

Cover image credit: DreadBongo