Breaking

Nous Research's Hermes Tops OpenClaw in New GitHub Contributors

June 23, 2026 at 15:30 EDT

AI Agents
Open Source

Nous Research's open-source AI agent "Hermes Agent" has surpassed the front-running OpenClaw in new GitHub contributors over the past 30 days, recent data shows. The shift suggests developer interest in personal autonomous AI agents is partly migrating from the breakout incumbent toward a challenger.

Open-Source AI Agents · Nous Research

Hermes Agent Overtakes OpenClaw in New Contributors

A self-improving newcomer that auto-generates its own skills is now drawing more fresh GitHub contributors than the first-mover that exploded to 380k stars — proof the AI-agent race is still wide open.

Hermes leads in new contributors over the last 30 days

300+

tool calls per task in some cases — token usage runs high

MIT

Hermes released open-source around February 2026

Total GitHub Stars

OpenClaw's first-mover community still towers — but momentum is shifting.

~170k

Hermes Agent

140k–200k stars

~380k

OpenClaw

peaked ~380k stars

Contributors to date: Hermes 1,532+ · OpenClaw ~2,476

The Key Difference — How Skills Are Built

Hermes — The Learning Loop

Interact → Remember → Auto-generate skill → Refine

The agent grows itself from past interactions.

OpenClaw — ClawHub

Human writes skill → Share on ClawHub → Others reuse

Relies on community-authored, shared skills.

Why developers switch to Hermes

Self-improving with persistent memory
Skill generation from experience
Web search, image gen, TTS & browser automation built in — no extra API keys
Runs local models (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp)

The catches & OpenClaw's woes

Hermes: enormous token usage, a strong model (Sonnet) recommended
OpenClaw: instability and frequent stalls
OpenClaw: problems saving skills
OpenClaw: security concerns — CVEs and malicious skills

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