Venice AI, a privacy focused open-source tool, is free for Morpheus token holders. Erik Voorhees sees Venice AI as means to fight for digital freedom.

Cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees announced the public launch of his latest venture, Venice AI. It is a privacy-focused generative AI chatbot.

Acknowledging the important work done by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in pushing the field of generative AI forward, Voorhees said consumers should still have the choice to use open-source AI.

“I saw where AI is going, which is to be captured by large tech companies that are in bed with the government,” Voorhees told Decrypt. “And that really worried me, and I see how powerful AI is, how consequential it can be—an amazing realm of new technologies.”

According to Voorhees, the antidote to that is open-source decentralization, i.e. not giving monopoly power over this stuff to anyone.

Venice AI does not store user data and can’t see user conversations, Voorhees said, explaining that Venice AI sends users’ text input through an encrypted proxy server to a decentralized GPU that runs the AI model, which then sends the answer back.

“The whole point of that is for security,” Voorhees said.

Voorhees launched the ShapeShift cryptocurrency exchange in 2014. In July 2021, the exchange said it would transition to an open-source decentralized exchange (DEX), with control of the exchange transferring from Voorhees to the ShapeShift DAO.

Then a number of scandals occured leading to an ultimate demise of the Voorhees creation. ShapeShift announced in March that it would shut down after becoming embroiled in a battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The exchange agreed to pay a $275,000 fine and abide by a cease-and-desist order to settle allegations that the exchange allowed users to trade digital assets without registering as a broker or exchange with the agency.