Hermes Agent at a glance
Hermes Agent, released by Nous Research on February 25, 2026 under the MIT license, runs on your own server or cloud sandbox, talks to you through chat apps, works with any model provider, and writes and refines its own skills from completed tasks.
What changed with Hermes Agent
Nous Research, the open-model lab behind the Hermes model family, listed Hermes Agent on its releases page on February 25, 2026, describing it as an autonomous agent that lives on your server, remembers what it learns and gets more capable the longer it runs. The code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
Its main idea is a learning loop. After complex tasks the agent writes reusable skills and improves them as it uses them; it curates its own memory, searches past sessions, and builds a model of the user with the Honcho library. Skills follow the open agentskills.io format. A single gateway process lets people talk to it from Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email or the terminal.
Hermes is not tied to Nous models. Users can switch between Nous Portal, OpenRouter, OpenAI or their own endpoint with one command. It includes a scheduler for unattended jobs, can spawn subagents for parallel work, and runs commands locally or in sandboxed backends such as Docker, SSH, Modal, Daytona and Vercel Sandbox, so it can sit on a cheap VPS rather than a laptop.
Hermes Agent in numbers
Values are copied from the linked source on the date shown. They are not IA Compa measurements.
- GitHub stars (NousResearch/hermes-agent)as of · Source for GitHub stars (NousResearch/hermes-agent): github.com (opens in a new tab)
- 260,920
Where to compare Hermes Agent
Independent leaderboards and official resources for comparing this model yourself. Rankings change often; each site shows its own current data.
Why Hermes Agent matters for businesses
Hermes quickly drew users away from OpenClaw: its first tagged release shipped an official migration tool for OpenClaw setups. For small businesses, an agent that keeps its memory and skills on infrastructure you control is attractive for recurring back-office work, but it still needs scoped credentials, a sandboxed terminal backend and quick updates when security fixes ship.
Put it to work: AI Agents
Hermes Agent updates since publication
Dated changes since publication. The original article text above is kept as written on its date.
Update (Updated)
Nous Research announced a $90 million round from investors including NVIDIA, M12, Samsung, Robot Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Menlo Ventures, and said it plans a Hermes for Businesses offering.
nousresearch.com (opens in a new tab)Update
GitHub published CVE-2026-53869 (high), a DNS rebinding flaw in Hermes Agent's WebSocket endpoints that let remote sites bypass Host and Origin checks, plus a medium file-permission issue. Both affect versions before 0.16.0; update to 0.16.0 or later.
github.com (opens in a new tab)Update
Hermes Agent v0.2.0, the first tagged GitHub release, shipped an official migration tool for moving from OpenClaw, among many other additions.
github.com (opens in a new tab)
Sources for this story
- Releases: Hermes Agent (02/25/26) (opens in a new tab)Official
Nous Research · nousresearch.com
- NousResearch/hermes-agent repository (opens in a new tab)Official
GitHub · github.com
- Hermes Agent v0.2.0 (2026.3.12) release notes (opens in a new tab)Official
GitHub (NousResearch/hermes-agent) · github.com
- A Note on Our Fundraise (opens in a new tab)Official
Nous Research · nousresearch.com
- Hermes agent maker Nous Research in talks for new funding at $1.5B valuation (opens in a new tab)Press
TechCrunch · techcrunch.com
- Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous Research (opens in a new tab)Press
SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com
Last verified: . IA Compa summarizes public announcements for business readers. We are not affiliated with the companies mentioned. Always confirm details, pricing, and availability with the official source.
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