What is Venice AI? The privacy-oriented chatbot

Venice AI is a generative AI platform designed from the ground up to be private and uncensored.

Like other AI models, Venice offers a consumer-facing chat interface and a developer API that supports text generation, image creation, and live web search. What sets Venice apart is not its superficial features, but the way it handles data, restrictions and payments.

Launched in 2024 by ShapeShift founder and former CEO Erik Voorhees, Venice is designed around the idea that users should be able to use modern AI systems without having their conversations stored on centralized servers and without being limited by rigid content filters.

“I saw where AI is going, and that will be adopted by large technology companies that are in bed with the government,” Voorhees said earlier. Declutter. “And that really worried me, and I see how powerful AI is, how big its impact can be – an amazing realm of new technologies.”

What Venice AI can do

Venice supports a full range of core AI capabilities:

• 🖨️ Text Generation: General chat, long form writing, research assistance and creative output using open-source major language models.
• 🖼️ Image Generation: Text-to-image generation via open-source image models.
• 📺 Video Generation: Text-to-video and image-to-video generation, introduced as part of Venice V2 and initially available to Beta and Pro users.
• 🔎 Real-time Internet Search: Comments that contain current information with clickable source links.
• 👨‍💻 Developer API: Programmatic access for applications and AI agents, where inference is assigned via staking or paid credits.

Subscription levels

Venice AI offers a free tier and a paid Pro plan. The free tier provides limited access to core features and basic API usage, including generating private text, images, and code using basic AI models, with 10 text prompts per day and 15 image prompts per day.

The Pro tier extends these capabilities with access to advanced models and character creation. Pro users can generate unlimited text, remove image watermarks, apply high-resolution upscaling, and create up to 1,000 images per day.

The Pro plan also includes a one-time grant of 1,000 credits for video generation or API usage. Pro costs $18 per month or $149 per year, with payment available via credit/debit cards, Bitcoin or Coinbase.

From the user’s perspective, Venice’s functionality is similar to other modern AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The difference lies in the way access and control are structured behind the scenes.

Privacy by design

Venice AI puts privacy at the heart of its design. The platform stores conversations locally in a user’s browser instead of storing them on company-controlled servers. By doing this, Venice limits the long-term storage of data and reduces how closely clues can be tied to a user’s identity.

“[The GPU] it sees the plain text of the specific prompt, but it doesn’t see all your other conversations, and Venice doesn’t see your conversations, and none of that is tied to your identity,” Voorhees said.

Uncensored AI

In addition to being privacy-focused, Venice also positions itself as an uncensored AI platform and has fewer restrictions than those imposed by mainstream AI consumer products. Venice emphasizes user control and configurability, allowing for a wider range of prompts and output, especially for creative or exploratory use cases.

Timeline: Venice AI, VVV and DIEM

• May 2024: Venice is launching publicly as a private, uncensored AI platform built on open source models.
• July 2024: Venice adds real-time web search with clickable quotes.
• November 2024: Venice is releasing an early version of its developer API.
• January 2025: Venice announces the Tourist Token and introduces a staking-based inference model.
• April 2025: Introduces text to image generation.
• August 2025: Introduces DIEM, a token designed to represent fixed daily AI inference credits, and announces a reduction in VVV inflation.
• October 2025: Venice V2 is announced, with the addition of video generation, outlining VVV’s deeper integration into the platform.

What is VVV?

VVV is Venice AI’s native token, which functions as an access token rather than a payment token. Built on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network foundation, it will have a total supply of 78 million VVV at launch.

When users deploy VVV, they receive a daily allocation of Venice API inference capacity to generate text, images, and code, without paying per request. Venice calculates that allocation as a pro-rata share of total API capacity, measured using an internal unit called Diem.

Venice sets inference limits based on each user’s share of VVV staked among active stakers, defined as accounts that have made at least one API call in the last seven days. Users do not spend VVV to make requests; they deploy it and draw from their daily allotment as necessary.

While deployed, VVV also earns an emissions-based return, distributed based on demand on the Venice API.

What is DIEM?

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

Each DIEM offers $1 per day in Venice API credits forever, giving holders a fixed daily allocation of AI computing instead of usage-based pricing. Users can only earn DIEM by locking the staked VVV.

Although VVV is tied to DIEM’s coin, it continues to earn 80% of normal betting returns. Burning DIEM unlocks the original VVV stake at any time.

DIEM is an ERC-20 token on Base that can be staked for API access, transferred or traded, allowing AI inference capability to exist as a standalone, tradable asset.

How Venice charges for AI access

Most AI APIs bill per token or per call. Venice offers an alternative: users can stake VVV to receive a pro-rata share of the platform’s daily inference capacity, tracked in an internal unit called Diem.

API usage then pulls up that daily Diem allocation (with different models costing different amounts), and the allocation resets every day, so it’s predictable but not unlimited.

Venice also lets users pay directly in USD for inferences via a Pro account, but positions staking as the way to avoid per-request billing issues for high-frequency automation.

Venice AI is an attempt to differentiate between who controls AI, how it is paid for, and who can use it. Privacy, uncensored access and tokenized inference are the tools it uses to enable that separation.