How Nous Research used BotID to block automated abuse at scale
Nous Research adopted BotID bot protection after automated scripts overwhelmed its free-tier Hermes model promotion, bypassing Turnstile via bulk fake accounts to circumvent rate limits.
AI lab made Hermes, their open-source language model, free for one week to increase accessibility. Within days, automated scripts overwhelmed the service with fake accounts performing high-volume inference requests across thousands of accounts to bypass rate limits.Nous Research Despite having Cloudflare Turnstile in place, bulk signups continued.
The abuse led to wasted inference compute and inflated identity provider bills. After the promotion ended, Nous realized that before reintroducing any kind of free tier, it needed a stronger layer of bot protection. Read more