Provider Routing

When using OpenRouter or Nous Portal as your LLM provider, Hermes Agent supports provider routing — fine-grained control over which underlying AI providers handle your requests and how they're prioritized.

OpenRouter routes requests to many providers (e.g., Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, Together AI). Provider routing lets you optimize for cost, speed, quality, or enforce specific provider requirements.

:::tip Traffic routed through Nous Portal respects the same provider preferences — and Portal subscribers get 10% off token-billed providers. :::

Configuration

Add a provider_routing section to your ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "price"           # How to rank providers
  only: []                # Whitelist: only use these providers
  ignore: []              # Blacklist: never use these providers
  order: []               # Explicit provider priority order
  require_parameters: false  # Only use providers that support all parameters
  data_collection: null   # Control data collection ("allow" or "deny")

:::info Provider routing only applies when using OpenRouter or Nous Portal. It has no effect with direct provider connections (e.g., connecting directly to the Anthropic API). :::

Options

`sort`

Controls how OpenRouter ranks available providers for your request.

Value	Description
`"price"`	Cheapest provider first
`"throughput"`	Fastest tokens-per-second first
`"latency"`	Lowest time-to-first-token first

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "price"

`only`

Whitelist of provider slugs. When set, only these providers will be used. All others are excluded. Use the lowercase slug shown by OpenRouter for each provider.

yaml

provider_routing:
  only:
    - "anthropic"
    - "google"

`ignore`

Blacklist of provider names. These providers will never be used, even if they offer the cheapest or fastest option.

yaml

provider_routing:
  ignore:
    - "together"
    - "deepinfra"

`order`

Explicit priority order. Providers listed first are preferred. Unlisted providers are used as fallbacks.

yaml

provider_routing:
  order:
    - "anthropic"
    - "google"
    - "amazon-bedrock"

`require_parameters`

When true, OpenRouter will only route to providers that support all parameters in your request (like temperature, top_p, tools, etc.). This avoids silent parameter drops.

yaml

provider_routing:
  require_parameters: true

`data_collection`

Controls whether providers can use your prompts for training. Options are "allow" or "deny".

yaml

provider_routing:
  data_collection: "deny"

Practical Examples

Optimize for Cost

Route to the cheapest available provider. Good for high-volume usage and development:

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "price"

Optimize for Speed

Prioritize low-latency providers for interactive use:

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "latency"

Optimize for Throughput

Best for long-form generation where tokens-per-second matters:

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "throughput"

Lock to Specific Providers

Ensure all requests go through a specific provider for consistency:

yaml

provider_routing:
  only:
    - "anthropic"

Avoid Specific Providers

Exclude providers you don't want to use (e.g., for data privacy):

yaml

provider_routing:
  ignore:
    - "together"
    - "lepton"
  data_collection: "deny"

Preferred Order with Fallbacks

Try your preferred providers first, fall back to others if unavailable:

yaml

provider_routing:
  order:
    - "anthropic"
    - "google"
  require_parameters: true

How It Works

Provider routing preferences are passed to OpenRouter or Nous Portal on agent chat requests and iteration-limit summaries via the extra_body.provider field. (extra_body is the OpenAI Python SDK argument; it becomes the top-level provider object in the JSON request.) Auxiliary tasks such as compression and title generation are configured independently under auxiliary.<task>.extra_body.

CLI mode — configured in ~/.hermes/config.yaml, loaded at startup
Gateway mode — same config file, loaded when the gateway starts

The routing config is read from config.yaml and passed as parameters when creating the AIAgent:

providers_allowed  ← from provider_routing.only
providers_ignored  ← from provider_routing.ignore
providers_order    ← from provider_routing.order
provider_sort      ← from provider_routing.sort
provider_require_parameters ← from provider_routing.require_parameters
provider_data_collection    ← from provider_routing.data_collection

:::tip You can combine multiple options. For example, sort by price but exclude certain providers and require parameter support:

yaml

provider_routing:
  sort: "price"
  ignore: ["together"]
  require_parameters: true
  data_collection: "deny"

:::

Default Behavior

When no provider_routing section is configured (the default), the aggregator uses its own default routing logic, which generally balances cost and availability automatically.

:::tip Provider Routing vs. Fallback Models Provider routing controls which sub-providers behind OpenRouter or Nous Portal handle your requests. For automatic failover to an entirely different provider when your primary model fails, see Fallback Providers. :::