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Venice is Here to Win: How a Private AI Company Plans to Take On OpenAI and Anthropic

June 8, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In a recent court case, a company CEO used ChatGPT to figure out how to terminate a contractual earnout, followed the plan, and was later sued by the person whose earnout was terminated. The plaintiff subpoenaed OpenAI and obtained all the records, proving the CEO acted nefariously. This is the kind of scenario Venice, a private AI company, is built to prevent — not by policing behavior, but by ensuring that no one can subpoena your conversations in the first place.

The Two Pillars: Privacy and Unrestricted Access

Venice was founded on two core convictions. The first is that it is dystopian for a handful of tech companies to build databases of everyone’s most intimate thoughts. The second is that the content moderation committees at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have too much power over what models can and cannot say. As John, Head of Strategy at Venice, puts it, users get refusals for “very benign” requests — not attempts to do anything crazy, but basic tasks where the AI “tries to steer them elsewhere, or sometimes even tells them to like go to sleep instead.” This frustration drives users to seek an alternative where the AI “is just gonna do the thing I ask and not basically moralize.”

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (01:15) **Why Private AI Matters** - John explains the core problem: centralized AI companies building databases of users' most intimate thoughts
  • 2 (05:27) **Market Size and Positioning** - Venice aims to be a household AI brand, not just a private AI niche player
  • 3 (07:48) **How Venice Competes with OpenAI and Anthropic** - Two foundational pillars: privacy and unrestricted AI
  • 4 (10:19) **Agentic Chat and Model Aggregation** - Venice's new Agentic Chat removes cognitive load of choosing models
  • 5 (12:35) **Open Source vs. Closed Source Strategy** - Venice aggregates open source models and also wraps closed source models with anonymization
  • 6 (17:13) **Who Needs Private AI** - Use cases range from medical records (HIPAA) to corporate secrets to personal privacy
  • 7 (24:01) **Recent Growth Drivers** - Four factors drove Venice's high growth in the last two months

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

AI is quickly becoming the interface through which people think, work, and make decisions—but most users have no idea how much personal data they're handing over in the process. Jon and Jesse from Venice join David to make the case for privacy-first AI, explain why Venice is aiming to become a mainstream consumer AI brand, and explore how $VVV and DIEM transform inference into a crypto-economic primitive.

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Intro
1:12 Why Private AI Matters
3:01 The AI Data Honeypot
6:07 Venice’s Consumer AI Ambition
8:01 Beating the Big AI Labs
10:19 Model Aggregation and Agentic Chat
12:29 Open Source, Closed Source, and Private Grok
17:14 Who Actually Needs Private AI?
21:58 Venice’s User Base
23:53 What Drove Venice’s Recent Growth
27:21 $VVV, DIEM, and Tokenized Inference
29:00 Where Venice Gets Its Compute
32:17 Bonding Curves and DIEM Monetary Policy
39:14 Real Tokenomics, Not Just a Pie Chart
45:46 AI Agents Need Inference to Exist
52:54 ShapeShift DNA Inside Venice
55:53 Regulation, AI, and Individual Rights

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RESOURCES

Jon ShapeShift
https://x.com/JonShapeShift

Jesse Proudman
https://x.com/jesseproudman

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
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