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Key Takeaways
- Hermes Agent now leads OpenRouter’s global daily app and agent rankings with 224 billion daily tokens, surpassing OpenClaw.
- The rivalry between Hermes and OpenClaw centers on a fundamental architectural disagreement: one focuses on breadth of reach while the other emphasizes depth of learning.
- Hermes Agent has shipped major releases frequently since its February 2026 launch, including v0.13.0 in May 2026 which introduced features like Kanban boards and improved security.
- OpenClaw’s security record is more concerning with multiple high-impact vulnerabilities disclosed over a short period. In contrast, Hermes Agent has had fewer but still notable security issues, including one CVE from April 27–29, 2026.
- The two frameworks are increasingly being run in parallel — OpenClaw for orchestration and routing, and Hermes for executing tasks autonomously — with a shared communication protocol (ACP).
OpenRouter Global Rankings — May 10, 2026
Hermes Agent vs OpenClaw: The Open-Source AI Agent Showdown
Nous Research’s Hermes Agent claims #1 on daily global token rankings · Data sourced from OpenRouter, NVD, GitHub
Head-to-Head
| Hermes Agent | OpenClaw | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | Nous Research (MIT) | Peter Steinberger / Foundation (OpenAI sponsor) |
| Launched | February 2026 | Late 2025 |
| GitHub Stars | 114,000+ | 370,000+ |
| Daily Tokens | 224B (#1 OpenRouter) | 186B (#2 OpenRouter) |
| All-Time Tokens | 6.35T | 9.17T |
| Architecture | Self-improving execution loop; do–learn–improve | WebSocket Gateway; central routing controller |
| Memory | SQLite FTS5 + persistent identity + auto-generated skills | Markdown-based; human-authored skills via ClawHub |
| Skill Ecosystem | 40+ built-in tools; agentskills.io standard; auto-generates skills | 44,000+ ClawHub skills (April 2026) |
| Platforms | 20 (incl. Google Chat, QQBot, WeChat, iMessage) | 50+ channels |
| Model Support | 200+ via OpenRouter; NVIDIA NIM; AWS Bedrock; Ollama; local | OpenAI-compatible; OpenRouter; Ollama |
| Latest Version | v0.13.0 — May 7, 2026 | Active (LTS announced May 2026) |
| CVE Count | 4 CVEs (Apr 27–29; affect v0.8.0) | 9 CVEs in 4 days (Mar 2026); one CVSS 9.9 |
| Migration | hermes claw migrate imports OpenClaw config automatically | — |
Hermes Agent Release History
v0.13.0 — The Tenacity Release (May 7, 2026)
- Introduced Kanban as a durable multi-agent task board with heartbeat monitoring, zombie detection, and hallucination recovery.
- Added the
/goalcommand that locks the agent on a target across turns. - Implemented Checkpoints v2 with real state pruning.
- Enabled gateway auto-resume after restart.
- Google Chat became the 20th supported messaging platform.
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Originally published at marktechpost.com. Curated by AI Maestro.
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