Introducing Arete-27B: Qwen3.8-27B, post-trained to reinforce Western values. Chinese open models are currently the strongest available, but they ship with state-aligned behavior in the weights. We built an 803-prompt eval across seven value categories, including freedom of expression, democracy, and privacy, and measured how often a model adopts China’s party line. After fine-tuning on roughly 53 million tokens, Arete-27B's propaganda rate fell from 22% to 1%, in line with the Western models we tested. Its Hermes Bench score shows no significant performance tradeoffs. The values in an open model are one fine-tune away. Our eval, weights, and training data are available now along with the full blog post:

Hy4, the new model from @TencentHunyuan, is 80% off in Nous Portal for one week. It adds image input and computer use, and Tencent trained it for game development in Unity, Unreal and Godot and for editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Try it today at

The Hermes Agent Plugin Hackathon starts now! It runs for 7 days, with $20,000 in cash prizes and more. Plugins are the most powerful way to extend Hermes Agent, and we want this hackathon to show what they can do. A plugin can change anything from the model Hermes runs on, where it stores its memory, where it runs commands, which messaging apps it works in and what Hermes Desktop shows. Plugins in the marketplace already let Hermes do things like control a phone or turn a photo into a printable 3D model. Every kind of plugin is eligible, so build whatever functionality you want Hermes to have. We'll list accepted entries in the new Hermes Marketplace, where every Hermes user can install them. Prizes 1st: $10,000 + neon sign + merch + $1,000 creds 2nd: $5,000 + neon sign + merch + $1,000 creds 3rd: $2,500 + neon sign + merch + $1,000 creds 4th: $1,500 + merch + $500 creds 5th: $1,000 + merch + $500 creds Runners up (x5): merch + $250 creds Submissions are due 5PM EST on Nov 11th. To enter: 1. Open a pull request that adds your plugin to the Hermes plugin catalog: 2. Post a demo video on X and tag @NousResearch 3. Submit both links through the form: Your entry is the plugin itself. Judges score it on usefulness, reliability, polish and creativity, and they favor plugins that do more than a prompt or a skill could. Keep the demo under 90 seconds and show the plugin working. The developer guide shows how to build and test a plugin: When submissions close, we'll open a thread for every entry in the Nous Research Discord, so you can browse all the plugins and talk to the people who built them. You can submit the form as soon as your pull request is open. The catalog checks run once a maintainer starts them, and we review entries every few days. If you have any questions stop by the Nous Research Discord: GLHF!

Plugins, connectors, and skills for Hermes Agent are now unified in a single marketplace so you can easily browse and extend your Hermes experience in a few clicks. The new Hermes Marketplace has everything your agent needs:

Thank you to everyone who traveled from across the world to NousCon 2026. We loved spending time with the people who make the Hermes community great. As you all know, we released the Hermes Mobile beta at the event, and as anticipated it filled up quickly. We are working tirelessly to free up more room in the beta, and to get the app production ready for wider release. The feedback has been incredible so far, and we are excited to share it with the world soon. In the meantime, please join the waitlist at

Update your priors: Every nous portal sub in Hermes comes with a cloud agent and it's own computer now, high usage limit models, and all of your tools like search, scrape, browser use, image gen and more

Been focusing on the Desktop app this last week or two. This PR should be welcome news to a lot of you power users. On next full release later this week I think you'll start noticing the difference in the desktop app getting noticeably nicer. Still a long way to go, but we'll get there. Lots of UX and design work coming shortly.

Tomorrow gonna be a movie fr (If they made movies about Discord groups that do foundational research and post-training then blossom into companies that proliferate the most widely used open source agent harness in the world that host an annual conference every year except it's actually more like a big party slash beta test slash merch distribution mechanism)

Introducing the @ElevenLabs SFX plugin, built to continue the work on a suite of Game Dev Studio capabilities for your Hermes Agent! Hermes made this demo video to see it in action, you can install it right now from the plugins catalog: The plugin adds a tool to hook up your ElevenLabs account API and generated sounds for whatever you need. Additionally, on the desktop app, the plugin adds a gallery of all of your generated SFX, easy integration into your game or other multimedia, looping, cost, cycling through the generations for that sound effect, and more! Enjoy