# Hermes > Disambiguation; this note is the **Hermes LLM family**. The agent harness that shares the name is [[Hermes Agent]]. Both ship from [[Nous Research]] and are commonly referenced together; they are different artifacts. Hermes is the flagship open-weight [[Large Language Models (LLMs)|LLM]] series from [[Nous Research]]. The Hermes models are instruction-tuned fine-tunes built on top of popular open-weight bases (Llama, Mistral, Qwen), known for strong steerability, neutral system-prompt behavior, and first-class support for tool use and structured output — which has made them a common backbone for agentic workflows. ## Key characteristics - **Open-weight** — distributed via Hugging Face under the Nous Research org - **Steerability** — designed to follow user/system prompts without an opinionated built-in persona - **Function calling and structured output** — first-class, aimed at agent integration - **Base-model diversity** — Hermes variants exist on top of Llama, Mistral, and Qwen bases (e.g., Hermes 2, Hermes 3, Hermes 4) - **Agent-friendly** — commonly used as the model backbone for autonomous agent stacks alongside closed-weight options ## In the agentic coding ecosystem Hermes is cited alongside [[OpenClaw]] as one of the autonomous agent tools whose workloads [[Kimi K2.6]] targets (Moonshot's K2.6 launch singled out Hermes as a representative agentic deployment). In practice, Hermes-based agents run on stacks like [[Ollama]] or vLLM and plug into agent harnesses the same way closed-weight models do. ## Why it matters - Demonstrates that open-weight fine-tunes (not just base models) can be competitive substrates for serious agent work - Pairs naturally with the [[AI Open Weight Models|open-weight]] frontier ([[Kimi]], [[Qwen]], [[Deepseek]]) to form a fully-open agent stack - Backed by [[Nous Research]]'s broader bet on decentralized training and user-sovereign AI ## References - Nous Research Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/NousResearch - Nous Research website: https://nousresearch.com/ - Kimi K2.6 launch (agentic tool context): https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6 ## Related - [[Hermes Agent]] - [[Atropos]] - [[Nous Research]] - [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]] - [[AI Open Weight Models]] - [[AI Agents]] - [[AI Tool Use]] - [[AI Fine-Tuning]] - [[Kimi K2.6]] - [[OpenClaw]] - [[Ollama]]