Technology

Nous CEO says labs will trap you or replace you

Nous Research CEO Dillon Rolnick told AI Engineer labs will either trap businesses in agents or replace them, pushing Hermes Agent as the ownable alternative.

StartupHub.ai Staff

By StartupHub.ai Staff, Editorial team

1 min read

Dillon Rolnick, CEO of Nous Research, speaking on stage about AI agents
Credit: AI Engineer

Dillon Rolnick told AI Engineer that businesses running closed agents for 70 percent of output are the affected system and no remote exploit is needed.

Nous CEO says labs will trap you or replace you - AI Engineer
Nous CEO says labs will trap you or replace you, AI Engineer

He flagged labs calling illicit distillation theft and calling model self defense safety, a detail that shows how rules get rewritten after lock in.

Rolnick said token prices are falling while spend surges, so labs must own the user layer or build God and solve markets directly.

He described agents as operating systems that combine deterministic code and data with non deterministic reasoning and judgment.

Hermes Agent is pitched as a foundation you can run anywhere and swap models in, listed on GitHub as the self improving AI agent from Nous Research, which has 116 repositories per GitHub.

The daily brief

Get the free daily brief with the day's AI news, new AI startups and funding rounds every morning.

Join 64,000 other subscribers.

Reproducing Grok bots in a weekend is neat, but you still carry evals, upgrades and uptime when the frontier moves.

If you harden processes around a closed agent now, you cannot take your ball home later without rebuilding the organization itself.

Mentioned in this story

Sources

Get the free daily brief every morning

Every morning the day's AI news, new AI startups and new funding rounds. Free and takes a few minutes to read, unsubscribe at any time.

Join 64,000 other subscribers.

TopicsNous ResearchHermes AgentDillon RolnickAI EngineerxAIGrok

StartupHub.ai Staff

Written by

StartupHub.ai Staff

Editorial team

The staff writers of StartupHub.ai, ranging from investment analysts to avid AI tool users, early adopters and critical enthusiasts. Backgrounds span engineering, business and the arts. We hold every piece to rigorous standards of research and review.

Test your Agent Readiness now

Paste your website. How well ChatGPT, Claude and the other agents can read and use a site, in about a minute, free.

Watch

The videos behind the news, one flip at a time

The feed mixes the videos from our articles with startup demos and you flip through them like TV channels for free with no signup.