AI lab Nous Research 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.
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.