# 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._

**Published:** 2026-11-05
**Source:** https://www.startuphub.ai/ai-news/technology/2026/nous-ceo-says-labs-will-trap-you-or-replace-you

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Dillon Rolnick told [AI Engineer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg6vtKOAOQ0) that businesses running closed agents for 70 percent of output are the affected system and no remote exploit is needed.

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.

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.

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Original analysis from [startuphub.ai](https://www.startuphub.ai), the #1 AI startup directory.

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