Hermes is Nous Research’s AI agent, released as a direct competitor to OpenClaw shortly after that project popularized locally run personal AI agents. Unlike a bare chat-based assistant, Hermes ships with built-in “skills” — web search, coding, and image understanding among them — and is designed to automatically learn new capabilities from how people actually use it, rather than requiring manual updates. Users can chat with Hermes directly or receive messages from it in apps like Telegram and Discord, running it continuously on a desktop or a virtual private server.
Hermes is open-source and has become one of the most widely adopted AI agent projects on GitHub, with roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. For users who don’t want to self-host, Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version on paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 a month. The company, founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, has also released open language models focused on coding and math.