Tech / AI
Launched in February, Hermes Now Tops OpenRouter Daily
Nous Research's self-improving agent hit 224 billion daily tokens on OpenRouter by May 10, passing a product already compressed by an April billing shock. Its founder had joined OpenAI ten days before Hermes launched.
Hermes Agent posted 224 billion daily tokens on OpenRouter on May 10, overtaking OpenClaw's 186 billion after launching a full month later.
OpenClaw's codebase first appeared January 25 under the name Clawdbot; Hermes followed February 25 under Nous Research. The NVIDIA RTX AI Garage blog, published May 13, called Hermes "the most used agent in the world according to OpenRouter." It cited 140,000 GitHub stars in under three months.
Hermes runs a closed learning loop: as agents complete tasks, they write reusable skill files stored locally and reused in later sessions. The v0.12.0 Curator release, April 30, added a background process that grades and prunes those files on 7-day cycles. Nous Research's internal benchmarks show agents with 20 or more self-created skills complete research tasks 40% faster, in tokens and time, than fresh instances.
Hermes shipped three major versions in 23 days, logging 3,516 combined commits. v0.13.0, May 7, patched 8 critical security vulnerabilities and added multi-agent task boards with hallucination recovery. v0.14.0, May 16, added native Windows support and cross-session Claude prompt caching.
OpenClaw's daily count was already compressing before Hermes passed it. Anthropic cut third-party subscription access on April 4, forcing 135,000-plus active instances onto pay-per-token billing overnight. Users publicly reported cutting token consumption by 85 percent to stay within budget.
Behind the billing shift sat a leadership vacancy. Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw's sole architect and founder, built the initial prototype in under an hour and described himself as "full-time open-sourcerer." He personally covered roughly $10,000 a month in server costs before joining OpenAI on February 15 to drive the next generation of personal agents.
He moved OpenClaw to an independent foundation; ten days after his departure, Hermes launched. OpenClaw leads all-time tokens 9.17 trillion to Hermes' 6.35 trillion and holds 370,000 GitHub stars to 140,000. Its ClawHub directory lists 44,000 community-built skills; Hermes ships 40-plus built-in tools with auto-generation.
The Anthropic billing shock and Steinberger's exit, arriving within two months, expose a gap the community-skill model cannot close from within. Daily throughput fell when external costs rose, and no internal loop rebuilt it. Hermes's compounding architecture answers both at once.
OpenClaw's all-time lead is 2.82 trillion tokens. At the current 38-billion daily gap, Hermes closes that by late July. Whether v0.14.0's Windows support pushes daily throughput past 300 billion before then is the first counterfactual to watch.