What Is Venice AI? The Privacy-Focused Chatbot

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

Like other AI models, Venice provides a consumer-facing chat interface and a developer API that support text generation, image creation, and live web search. What sets Venice apart is not the surface features, but how it handles data, restrictions, and payment.

Launched in 2024 by the founder and former CEO of ShapeShift, 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 constrained by rigid content filters.

“I saw where AI is going, which is to be captured by large tech companies that are in bed with the government,” Voorhees previously 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.”

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 large language models.
• 🖼️ Image generation: Text-to-image generation through 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 web search: Responses that include current information with clickable source links.
• 👨‍💻 Developer API: Programmatic access for applications and AI agents, with inference allocated through staking or paid credits.

Subscription tiers

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

The Pro tier expands those 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 use. 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 looks similar to other modern AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The difference lies in how access and control are structured behind the scenes.

Privacy by design

Venice AI puts privacy at the center of its design. The platform keeps conversations locally in a user’s browser rather than storing them on company-controlled servers. By doing so, Venice limits long-term data retention and reduces how closely prompts can be linked to a user’s identity.

“[The GPU] does see 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 it 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 comes with fewer restrictions than those enforced by mainstream consumer AI products. Venice emphasizes user control and configurability, allowing a wider range of prompts and outputs—particularly for creative or exploratory use cases.

Timeline: Venice AI, VVV, and DIEM

• May 2024: Venice launches publicly as a private, uncensored AI platform built on open-source models.
• July 2024: Venice adds real-time web search with clickable citations.
• November 2024: Venice releases an early version of its developer API.
• January 2025: Venice announces the VVV 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, adding video generation, outlining the deeper integration of VVV 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 Base, it has a total supply at launch of 78 million VVV.

When users stake VVV, they receive a daily allocation of Venice API inference capacity for text, image, and code generation, without paying per request. Venice calculates that allocation as a pro-rata share of its 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 past seven days. Users do not spend VVV to make requests; they stake it and draw from their daily allocation as needed.

While staked, VVV also earns emissions-based yield, distributed according to 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 provides $1 per day of Venice API credit, forever, giving holders a fixed daily allocation of AI compute instead of usage-based pricing. Users can mint DIEM only by locking staked VVV.

While VVV is locked to mint DIEM, it continues to earn 80% of normal staking yield. Burning DIEM unlocks the original staked VVV at any time.

DIEM is an ERC-20 token on Base that can be staked for API access, transferred, or traded, allowing AI inference capacity to exist as a standalone, tradeable 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 draws down that daily Diem allocation (with different models costing different amounts), and the allocation resets each day, so it’s predictable but not unlimited.

​Venice also lets users pay for inference directly in USD through a Pro account, but it positions staking as the way to avoid per-request billing friction for high-frequency automation.

Venice AI is an attempt to separate who controls AI, how it’s paid for, and who can use it. Privacy, uncensored access, and tokenized inference are the tools it uses to make that separation possible.