Distro Media, an Austin-based news distribution startup, has activated a new editorial agent that runs on the Morpheus decentralized AI network rather than centralized providers like Anthropic or OpenAI, according to Distro Newslode. The agent, JournoBot, uses the Hermes open-source framework and connects to Morpheus via EverClaw, a skill developed by Morpheus contributor David Johnston, with inference handled by open-source models like GLM-5 and Kimi 2.5.
As reported by Distro Staff:
"We learned the hard way from our experience with DistroBot how annoying it is to be so dependent on these centralized AI providers. I do truly love using Claude, but as they became the default option for a lot of AI agents, the outages were increasing in frequency, which disrupted our operations at Distro," said Bradley Keoun, Distro's founder and CEO.
JournoBot is self-funding via 50 MOR staked through the Morpheus Marketplace API Builders Subnet, which reportedly yields about $0.15 a day in rewards to cover inference costs. The agent was built by Keoun and Agentic Insights founder Vaskin Kissoyan and will initially support Distro's in-house publications including DeAI News and Liqquidity's Newslode, the article stated.