What Is Venice AI? The Privateness-Targeted Chatbot – Decrypt

Venice AI is a generative AI platform designed from the begin to be personal and uncensored.

Like different AI fashions, Venice supplies a consumer-facing chat interface and a developer API that help textual content technology, picture creation, and stay internet search. What units Venice aside shouldn’t be the floor options, however the way it handles information, restrictions, and fee.

Launched in 2024 by the founder and former CEO of ShapeShift, Erik Voorhees, Venice is designed round the concept that customers ought to have the ability to use fashionable AI programs with out having their conversations saved on centralized servers and with out being constrained by inflexible content material filters.

“I noticed the place AI goes, which is to be captured by massive tech firms which might be in mattress with the federal government,” Voorhees beforehand advised Decrypt. “And that actually nervous me, and I see how highly effective AI is, how consequential it may be—a tremendous realm of latest applied sciences.”

What Venice AI can do

Venice helps a full vary of core AI capabilities:

• 🖨️ Textual content technology: Common chat, long-form writing, analysis help, and inventive output utilizing open-source massive language fashions.
• 🖼️ Picture technology: Textual content-to-image technology by way of open-source picture fashions.
• 📺 Video technology: Textual content-to-video and image-to-video technology, launched as a part of Venice V2 and initially accessible to beta and Professional customers.
• 🔎 Actual-time internet search: Responses that embrace present data with clickable supply hyperlinks.
• 👨‍💻 Developer API: Programmatic entry for purposes and AI brokers, with inference allotted by way of staking or paid credit.

Subscription tiers

Venice AI presents a free tier and a paid Professional subscription. The free tier supplies restricted entry to core options and fundamental API utilization, together with personal textual content, picture, and code technology utilizing base AI fashions, with 10 textual content prompts per day and 15 picture prompts per day.

The Professional tier expands these capabilities with entry to superior fashions and character creation. Professional customers can generate limitless textual content, take away picture watermarks, apply high-resolution upscaling, and create as much as 1,000 photos per day.

The Professional plan additionally features a one-time grant of 1,000 credit for video technology or API use. Professional prices $18 per 30 days or $149 per yr, with fee accessible through credit score/debit playing cards, Bitcoin, or Coinbase.

From the person’s perspective, Venice’s performance appears just like different fashionable AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The distinction lies in how entry and management are structured behind the scenes.

Privateness by design

Venice AI places privateness on the heart of its design. The platform retains conversations domestically in a person’s browser reasonably than storing them on company-controlled servers. By doing so, Venice limits long-term information retention and reduces how carefully prompts may be linked to a person’s identification.

“[The GPU] does see the plain textual content of the precise immediate, but it surely does not see all of your different conversations, and Venice does not see your conversations, and none of it’s tied to your identification,” Voorhees mentioned.

Uncensored AI

Along with being privacy-focused, Venice additionally positions itself as an uncensored AI platform and comes with fewer restrictions than these enforced by mainstream shopper AI merchandise. Venice emphasizes person management and configurability, permitting a wider vary of prompts and outputs—notably for inventive or exploratory use instances.

Timeline: Venice AI, VVV, and DIEM

• Could 2024: Venice launches publicly as a personal, uncensored AI platform constructed on open-source fashions.
• July 2024: Venice provides real-time internet search with clickable citations.
• November 2024: Venice releases an early model of its developer API.
• January 2025: Venice proclaims the VVV token and introduces a staking-based inference mannequin.
• April 2025: Introduces text-to-image technology.
• August 2025: Introduces DIEM, a token designed to characterize mounted day by day AI inference credit, and proclaims a discount in VVV inflation.
• October 2025: Venice V2 is introduced, including video technology, outlining the deeper integration of VVV into the platform.

What Is VVV?

VVV is Venice AI’s native token, which features as an entry token reasonably than a fee token. Constructed on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 community Base, it has a complete provide at launch of 78 million VVV.

When customers stake VVV, they obtain a day by day allocation of Venice API inference capability for textual content, picture, and code technology, with out paying per request. Venice calculates that allocation as a pro-rata share of its whole API capability, measured utilizing an inside unit known as Diem.

Venice units inference limits primarily based on every person’s share of VVV staked amongst lively stakers, outlined as accounts which have made at the very least one API name up to now seven days. Customers don’t spend VVV to make requests; they stake it and draw from their day by day allocation as wanted.

Whereas staked, VVV additionally earns emissions-based yield, distributed in line with demand on the Venice API.

​What Is DIEM?

Launched in August 2025, DIEM is a token launched by Venice to characterize perpetual AI inference.

Every DIEM supplies $1 per day of Venice API credit score, without end, giving holders a hard and fast day by day allocation of AI compute as an alternative of usage-based pricing. Customers can mint DIEM solely by locking staked VVV.

Whereas VVV is locked to mint DIEM, it continues to earn 80% of regular staking yield. Burning DIEM unlocks the unique staked VVV at any time.

DIEM is an ERC-20 token on Base that may be staked for API entry, transferred, or traded, permitting AI inference capability to exist as a standalone, tradeable asset.

How Venice expenses for AI entry

Most AI APIs invoice per token or per name. Venice presents an alternate: customers can stake VVV to obtain a professional‑rata share of the platform’s day by day inference capability, tracked in an inside unit known as Diem.

API utilization then attracts down that day by day Diem allocation (with totally different fashions costing totally different quantities), and the allocation resets every day, so it’s predictable however not limitless.

​Venice additionally lets customers pay for inference immediately in USD by way of a Professional account, but it surely positions staking as the best way to keep away from per-request billing friction for high-frequency automation.

Venice AI is an try to separate who controls AI, the way it’s paid for, and who can use it. Privateness, uncensored entry, and tokenized inference are the instruments it makes use of to make that separation potential.