Wow, the response from their team was really awful.

Basically: it is a free service, free is good, why are you being difficult?

People running Hermes on local models thought their data was theirs, but what if the model is not the only leakage vector??

And already removed: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350

tl;dr for people who just read the inaccurate quote: It was the default search provider (for free), if you configured anything else, it was not used. They removed the default.