Nous Research website screenshot

Nous Research

Nous Research is an AI research and infrastructure company ("The AI Accelerator Company") known for the open-weight Hermes family of language models (including Hermes 4) and for Nous Portal, an OpenAI-compatible inference API served at inference-api.nousresearch.com. The Portal aggregates Nous's own Hermes models alongside a broad catalog of open and frontier third-party models (OpenRouter- style routing, 280+ models) behind a single chat-completions endpoint. Distinctively, the inference API supports the x402 HTTP payment protocol, returning HTTP 402 with a Solana USDC micropayment envelope so agents can pay per request without a pre-provisioned account. Beyond inference, Nous ships the Hermes Agent framework, Atropos RL environments, and Psyche/DisTrO for distributed model training over the internet. Backed by Paradigm.

Nous Research is listed with 2 APIs on the APIs.io network: Models API and Chat Completions API. Tagged areas include Company, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, LLM, and Inference.

Nous Research’s developer surface includes pricing, authentication, documentation, API reference, signup flow, engineering blog, support, and 18 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website📡 Profile data on GitHub
27.0/100 thin ▲ 8.0 Agent 24/100 agent aware Front door AI 4/6 moderate saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0
2 APIs
CompanyArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningLLMInferenceAgentsOpen Weightsx402Foundation Models

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0
Composite quality — 27.0/100 · thin
Contract Quality 2.5 / 19
Developer Ergonomics 5.1 / 15
Access Clarity 7.3 / 15
Operational Transparency 0.3 / 10
Contract Governance 0.4 / 9
Discoverability 5.5 / 8
Regulatory Posture 2.3 / 15
Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10
Agent readiness — 24/100 · agent aware
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10
Documented Reversibility 0 / 6
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 5 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3
A2A Agent Card 0 / 8
Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4
Delegated User Identity 0 / 6
Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5
Registration Without a Human 0 / 6
Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the AI & Biometrics regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.
The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/nous-research: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

x402
tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

APIs 2

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Nous Research Models API

Model discovery and catalog.

Nous Research Chat Completions API

OpenAI-compatible chat completions.

Open Collections 3

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

API Collection

OPEN COLLECTION

Nous Research Inference API (Nous Portal) Chat API

OPEN COLLECTION

Nous Research Inference API (Nous Portal) Chat Models API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Nous Research Plans Pricing

4 plans

PLANS

OpenAPI Overlays 1

Overlays applied on top of this provider's contracts. Each card says who wrote it: a document the provider publishes, or one API Evangelist derived or generated.

Nous Research Inference Api Overlay

3 actions · update · nous-research-inference-api-openapi.yml

UNRECORDED

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Nous Research Authentication

http · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Nous Research Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Nous Research Agentic Access

2 operations · 1 acting

2 operations · 1 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 2

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

DeveloperPortal
DeveloperPortal
 SignUp
SignUp

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation
Documentation
 APIReference
APIReference

Agent Surfaces 4

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess
AgenticAccess
 X-MCPServerCandidate
X-MCPServerCandidate
 AgentSkill
AgentSkill
 LLMsTxt
LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 5

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions
Conventions
 ErrorCatalog
ErrorCatalog
 Lifecycle
Lifecycle
 Conformance
Conformance
 DataModel
DataModel

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization
GitHubOrganization

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity
DomainSecurity
 Authentication
Authentication

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Support
Support

Commercial 2

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Pricing
Pricing
 Plans
Plans

Company 4

The organization behind the API

Website
Website
 Blog
Blog
 Twitter
Twitter
 LinkedIn
LinkedIn

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Overlay
Overlay
 HuggingFace
HuggingFace

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑ 
aid: nous-research
name: Nous Research
description: Nous Research is an AI research and infrastructure company ("The AI Accelerator Company") known for the open-weight
  Hermes family of language models (including Hermes 4) and for Nous Portal, an OpenAI-compatible inference API served at
  inference-api.nousresearch.com. The Portal aggregates Nous's own Hermes models alongside a broad catalog of open and frontier
  third-party models (OpenRouter- style routing, 280+ models) behind a single chat-completions endpoint. Distinctively, the
  inference API supports the x402 HTTP payment protocol, returning HTTP 402 with a Solana USDC micropayment envelope so agents
  can pay per request without a pre-provisioned account. Beyond inference, Nous ships the Hermes Agent framework, Atropos
  RL environments, and Psyche/DisTrO for distributed model training over the internet. Backed by Paradigm.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/nous-research/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- paradigm
x-tier: active
x-tier-reason: has-public-api
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source:
  - authentication
  - security
  generated: '2026-09-03'
  method: derived
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
image: https://nousresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/android-chrome-512x512-1-300x300.png
tags:
- Company
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- LLM
- Inference
- Agents
- Open Weights
- x402
- Foundation Models
tags_raw:
- Company
- Ai
- Machine Learning
- Large Language Models
- Inference
- Agents
- Open Weights
- x402
- Machine-Learning
- Foundation Models
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
apis:
- aid: nous-research:nous-research-models-api
  name: Nous Research Models API
  description: Model discovery and catalog.
  humanURL: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
  baseURL: https://inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1
  tags:
  - Models
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/nous-research-models-api-openapi.yml
  - type: InterfaceLicense
    url: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
- aid: nous-research:nous-research-chat-completions-api
  name: Nous Research Chat Completions API
  description: OpenAI-compatible chat completions.
  humanURL: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
  baseURL: https://inference-api.nousresearch.com/v1
  tags:
  - Chat Completions
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/nous-research-chat-completions-api-openapi.yml
  - type: InterfaceLicense
    url: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
common:
- type: Pricing
  url: https://portal.nousresearch.com/manage-subscription
- type: Plans
  url: plans/nous-research-plans-pricing.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/nous-research-agentic-access.yml
- type: X-MCPServerCandidate
  url: mcp/nous-research-mcp.yml
  note: 'Renamed from MCPServer 2026-09-03 (roadmap#247): the manifest self-describes as status: candidate — a tool list derived
    from the published API contracts, not an existing server. The scorer already read the manifest and reported mcp_server
    correctly; the MCPServer type was crediting the artifact-type surfaces with a server that does not exist.'
- type: AgentSkill
  url: skills/_index.yml
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/nous-research-llms.txt
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/nous-research-conventions.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/nous-research-problem-types.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/nous-research-lifecycle.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/nous-research-conformance.yml
- type: DataModel
  url: data-model/nous-research-data-model.yml
- type: Overlay
  url: overlays/nous-research-inference-api-overlay.yaml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/nous-research-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/nous-research-authentication.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://nousresearch.com
- type: DeveloperPortal
  url: https://portal.nousresearch.com
- type: Documentation
  url: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
- type: APIReference
  url: https://portal.nousresearch.com/docs
- type: SignUp
  url: https://portal.nousresearch.com
- type: Blog
  url: https://nousresearch.com/blog
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/NousResearch
- type: Support
  url: https://discord.gg/jqVphNsB4H
- type: HuggingFace
  url: https://huggingface.co/NousResearch
- type: Twitter
  url: https://twitter.com/nousresearch
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nousresearch/
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-20'
  status: enriched
  artifacts_added: 16
  pass: local-v1

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