Hermes Agent

Hermes Agent is an open-source, self-hosted AI agent built by Nous Research, the lab behind the Hermes and Nomos open-source model families, and released under the MIT license. It runs on a machine or server its user controls, keeps persistent memory across sessions, and writes its own reusable skills: after a complex task it creates a SKILL.md file that records how the task was solved and refines it on later use. Full-text search with LLM summarization recalls past sessions, and a Honcho user model builds a profile of how its user works.

Hermes installs with one terminal command on Linux, macOS, WSL2, native Windows or Android through Termux, which Nous says takes about 60 seconds, and Hermes Desktop is a native app for macOS 12+, Windows 10 and 11 and Linux that runs the same agent core. A messaging gateway connects one agent and one memory to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email, Microsoft Teams and more than 20 other platforms, and Voice Mode adds real-time voice in the CLI, Telegram and Discord. Commands can run on the local machine, in Docker, over SSH, or in Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox or Singularity environments, natural-language cron scheduling runs reports, backups and briefings unattended, and isolated subagents with their own terminals and Python RPC scripts run parallel workstreams.

Hermes works with Nous Portal, OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Hugging Face or a local model through Ollama. It connects to MCP servers and can also run as an MCP server, and Nous documents an MCP route for managing Hermes Cloud agents. A plugin catalog adds memory providers such as Honcho, Mem0, Supermemory and Cognee, along with browser, image, video, web-search and terminal-environment plugins, and the community skills library follows the agentskills.io standard. The GitHub repository has 262k stars, and releases ship several times a month.

The agent itself is free under the MIT license when run with self-supplied model keys. Nous Portal, the managed model and tool service, has four monthly plans in USD with no annual option: Free at $0 with free models only, Plus at $20 with $22 in monthly credits, Super at $100 with $110 in credits and Ultra at $200 with $220 in credits, each paid tier including 200+ models and hosted tool use, with credit rollover capped at $10, $50 and $100. Hermes Cloud hosts an agent with no servers to manage and needs $2 in credits or an active subscription to deploy, and Nous offers business plans through the Portal.

When self-hosted with its own model keys, the agent, its memory and its skills stay on the infrastructure its user controls, apart from what is sent to the chosen model provider. Use of Nous Portal is governed by its privacy policy, updated September 28, 2026, which allows prompts, outputs, usage data and telemetry to be used to train and improve AI models, and users can turn on Privacy Mode to opt out. Hermes publishes no security certifications. Its safeguards are command approval, authorization controls and container isolation, and the default smart approval mode auto-approves low-risk shell commands, denies dangerous ones and asks only on uncertain cases.

Hermes Agent is best for technical users and small teams who want a persistent agent on their own infrastructure that remembers across sessions, works through their messaging apps and runs scheduled tasks unattended. Self-hosting still needs comfort with a terminal and API keys, and because the agent keeps running scheduled and multi-step tasks, model spending should be capped at the provider. People who want a hosted assistant without running an agent should consider Claude or ChatGPT. People who want one hosted agent that also makes pictures, video, songs, 3D models and apps across desktop and phone should consider superbot.

Current state Q4 2026: Hermes moved to semantic version numbers after the v2026.9.24 release and reached v0.22.2 on October 15, 2026, after five releases in eight days. The docs now cover native Windows and Android installs, Voice Mode, Microsoft Teams and a plugin catalog that includes third-party memory providers.