# Is Hermes Agent HIPAA compliant? It is self-hosted, so the question moves - Tool: Compliance - Last updated: August 2026 ## TL;DR Wrong question. Hermes Agent is MIT-licensed software that runs on your own machine or server, so no vendor receives data from the binary and there is nobody to sign a Business Associate Agreement with. That only holds if you also run the model yourself. Nous Research sells hosted services — Nous Portal, the Tool Gateway and the preview Hermes Cloud — that do receive prompts, and no Nous document we read mentions HIPAA, PHI or a business associate. Re-plumbing an agent so no third party sees prompts takes us 6–10 weeks. ## Frequently asked questions ### It is MIT-licensed and runs on our own box. Isn't that the end of the conversation? It ends the vendor conversation and starts the configuration one. No vendor receives data from the binary, and its own metrics are opt-in with no remote destination. But the agent needs a model, and the documentation's recommended setup sends every prompt to Nous Portal. It also ships a tool gateway, a messaging gateway covering twenty messaging platforms, MCP support and a tracing plugin. Each of those is a way for prompt text to leave. The licence tells you nothing about which of them are on. ### Will Nous Research sign a BAA for Nous Portal or Hermes Cloud? We have no evidence either way, and that is the honest answer. We searched the whole repository, the documentation site, the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy for HIPAA, protected health information and business associate, and found nothing. Nobody has said no to you — no document addresses the subject at all. If you need one, ask them directly and get the answer in writing. Hermes Cloud is in preview and its support runs through Discord and a support mailbox, which tells you something about how mature that conversation is likely to be. ### We turned on Privacy Mode. Does that solve it? It changes the default and it is worth doing, but it is an account toggle, not zero data retention and not an agreement. The Privacy Policy states it may apply only on a prospective basis and may not affect information collected or incorporated into models beforehand, and that it does not stop the collection of operational metadata needed to run, route, secure, debug or bill for the service. So it does not help with what your team already pasted, and it does not create a counterparty who owes you anything under HIPAA. ### We point the model at our own server. Are we clear? You have closed the largest exit, not all of them. The Tool Gateway is configured per tool rather than globally, so web search, image generation, speech, cloud browser and cloud terminal calls can still be routed through Nous-managed infrastructure to five outside partners. MCP servers running elsewhere receive call arguments written from the conversation. A connected chat platform receives every message. Check those four things one at a time, because none of them follows the model setting. ### Our nurses answer the agent over WhatsApp. How bad is that? It is the sharpest issue on this page. Those messages go to the platform under your own credentials — Nous is not in the path, which also means no Nous agreement touches it. Your counterparty is Meta, or Telegram, or whoever carries the channel, and you would need a business associate agreement from each platform you connect. We checked Nous Research's documents, not the terms of the twenty platforms the gateway supports, so ask each one yourself; we did not survey those platforms' own terms, so treat each connected platform as a separate agreement you would have to obtain. The default WhatsApp route makes it worse: it is an unofficial bridge emulating a browser session, with no business relationship and, in the documentation's own words, it "carries a small risk of account restrictions". ### Is there any wording in the Terms that matters to a clinical product? One clause, and it is not about data. The Terms list, among prohibited activities alongside autonomous weapons systems and critical infrastructure control, use of the services for "medical diagnosis without qualified human oversight". Read that before you design a workflow where the agent's output reaches a clinician unreviewed. The Terms also contain a controller-and-processor clause that reads like a data protection agreement — it is not a business associate agreement, and it does not contain the terms HIPAA requires. ### How long does the re-plumbing take, and what does it cost? Six to ten weeks at $13,000–$25,000 for the engagement described above. The prompt-path map comes first and is the cheapest part; the inference cutover and the integration teardown are the bulk of it. What pushes a project towards ten weeks is rarely the code — it is several developers each running their own configuration, or a chat history long enough that someone has to read it rather than guess. --- Source: https://www.rapidevelopers.com/compliance/is-hermes-agent-hipaa-compliant © RapidDev — https://www.rapidevelopers.com/compliance/is-hermes-agent-hipaa-compliant