Nous Research's Hermes Agent Can Now Spend Real Money Autonomously

Hermes Agent -- the open-source agent framework that crossed 140,000 GitHub stars in under three months -- just got a lot more interesting for builders. Nous Research has kicked off a hackathon in partnership with NVIDIA and Stripe, challenging teams to build agents that can operate like a real business: earning revenue, spending money, and running operations autonomously. The timing is not accidental. It lands right as two major integrations -- NVIDIA's full agent stack and Stripe's agentic payment primitives -- become available natively inside Hermes.

The Stack Behind the Challenge

To understand why this hackathon matters, you need to understand what just got wired together. Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous AI agent built by Nous Research that lives on your server, remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs. It is not a wrapper around a single model API. It runs on top of 200+ models via OpenRouter, Nous Portal, NVIDIA NIM, OpenAI, or a custom endpoint.

The hackathon announcement bundles three distinct NVIDIA integrations into the Hermes ecosystem:

• NemoClaw (safety): NVIDIA NemoClaw is the open-source blueprint that ties the environment together. With a single command, NemoClaw installs the OpenShell runtime -- providing a secure environment for running autonomous agents like Hermes Agent more safely alongside open-source models like Nemotron. Think of OpenShell as a sandboxed jail for your agent: NemoClaw handles task decomposition, multi-agent delegation, tool invocation with error recovery, and policy enforcement through OpenShell -- a sandboxed runtime that prevents agents from accessing unauthorized system resources.
• Nemotron 3 Ultra (speed): NVIDIA's most capable model yet -- Nemotron 3 Ultra -- has 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameters and is the final and best model of the Nemotron 3 family. It employs a Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention architecture. In practice, it delivers up to 5x faster inference and lowers the cost of complex agentic tasks by up to 30%. Hermes users can already access it free via the Nous Portal.