Two names most business owners have never heard of just swapped places at the top of the world's busiest AI marketplace. The new #1 is Hermes Agent, a free, open-source AI agent from Nous Research that takes real actions on your behalf and, unlike most AI tools, remembers what it learns from one task to the next. The old #1 is OpenClaw, also open-source, which plugs into your messaging apps to get work done. The shift happened on OpenRouter (the platform that routes worldwide AI traffic across 300+ models), and the reason Hermes overtook OpenClaw is the same reason AI assistants are about to feel a lot less like ChatGPT and a lot more like a junior employee who learns your business.
What is OpenRouter, in one paragraph
OpenRouter is a power grid for AI. Instead of plugging your software into one provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), you plug into OpenRouter and it routes each request to whichever model fits the job. It also publishes a public leaderboard of which apps pull the most traffic; today's top two are both AI agents.
The dethroning, in numbers
Live snapshots from OpenRouter:
Hermes Agent. Source: OpenRouter.
OpenClaw. Source: OpenRouter.
| Hermes Agent (now #1) | OpenClaw (now #2) | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily global rank | #1 | #2 |
| Total tokens used since launch | 6.38 trillion | 9.53 trillion |
| Active since | March 2026 | January 2026 |
| Models supported | 349 | 383 |
| Category leaderboards | #1 in Productivity, Coding, Personal, CLI | #2 in the same four |
OpenClaw has more cumulative usage because it launched two months earlier. On daily traffic, Hermes is now ahead, and has held #1 through late April and into May.
What is Hermes Agent (and what is OpenClaw)?
Both are "AI agents." A normal AI tool like ChatGPT answers your question and stops. An AI agent does work: you give it a goal ("clean up our inbox", "draft three sales follow-ups from this CRM export") and it clicks buttons, opens files, sends messages, and reports back. (We unpacked the difference in why ChatGPT with connectors is still not an AI agent.)
We wrote a closer look at OpenClaw for Malaysian businesses in March. Hermes does the same things, but with one extra trick that matters a lot.
Why Hermes Agent is winning: it remembers
Most AI tools forget you the moment a conversation ends. Tomorrow's session starts from zero. Hermes is built differently: every time it solves a problem, it writes a short note to itself, and reads those notes first the next time a similar request arrives.
In practice, an agent your team uses in May will be measurably better at your work by August, without extra effort. The technical phrase is "persistent memory and self-improving skills." The business translation: this thing actually gets to know your company. It is also why Hermes keeps climbing on daily charts; teams using it tend to use it more over time, not less.
Should Malaysian businesses switch to Hermes Agent?
We have spent the last few months testing the new wave of AI agents on client work at Gotchaa Lab. Three honest observations.
The real news is not the leaderboard. The gap between an "AI demo" and "AI that works for your business" is not the model behind it; it is whether the agent can learn your business and remember what it learned. Hermes is the first widely-used agent that does this out of the box, and that shift will define the next two years of business AI.
These are not plug-and-play. Both are open-source, written for technical teams. To put one in front of non-technical staff, someone has to wrap it in a friendly interface, connect it to your real systems (accounting, WhatsApp Business, e-invoice), and put PDPA guardrails on what it can read or write.
Do not switch because a leaderboard moved. The real question is not "Hermes or OpenClaw," but "does our team have any AI agent yet, and if not, why not?"
If your business has not yet tried an AI agent for daily work, low-risk starts are customer email triage (flag urgent mail, draft holding replies) and proposal generation (fill your template from a sales call transcript). You do not need Hermes or OpenClaw specifically; you need a partner who knows the tools and your business well enough to pick one with proper boundaries. If that is the conversation you want, talk to us.
