Problem Statement

NemoClaw's normal policy presets should make common assistant tasks work out of the box through policy tier selection.

The gap: common tasks like weather and current-events lookup should work in normal balanced/open configurations, while still avoiding arbitrary world egress, direct news/article-site fetch, broad wildcard hosts, or generic binary access that increases prompt-injection and exfiltration risk.

This proposal is based on the current main agent defaults:

• OpenClaw 2026.5.22
• Hermes v2026.5.16

Proposed Design

Do not add a new policy tier. Keep the existing normal tier model:

• restricted: minimal baseline.
• balanced: safe common assistant defaults.
• open: the normal user-facing permissive posture.

Balanced: safe common defaults

Add a new built-in weather preset and include it in balanced and open.

Suggested endpoints:

• api.open-meteo.com
• geocoding-api.open-meteo.com
• api.weather.gov

Rules and guardrails:

• Use explicit hosts only.
• Use protocol: rest and enforcement: enforce.
• Allow GET/HEAD only.
• Do not use access: full.
• Do not use binaries: [{ path: "/**" }].
• Restrict binaries to the relevant agent/runtime paths.

News/current-events should remain search-first, not direct-site-first:

• OpenClaw: use the existing Brave Search path when web search is configured.
• Hermes: use the existing Nous managed nous-web gateway path when Hermes/Nous OAuth tools are configured.
• Do not add NewsAPI, direct news outlets, Reddit/social domains, or arbitrary article fetch to balanced defaults.

Open: useful normal permissive posture

Expand the existing open tier as the OOTB-useful normal permissive posture.

For both agents, add curated public reference/data APIs that are useful for assistant work but are not arbitrary browsing:

• Wikimedia/Wikipedia API access.
• Wikidata API/data access.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim geocoding/search access.
• REST Countries country metadata access.
• The new weather preset from balanced.

Keep these guarded like normal presets:

• Explicit hosts.
• Prefer GET/HEAD only.
• No wildcard world egress.
• No access: full unless a service absolutely requires it and the issue/PR documents why.
• No generic "/**" binary access.

For Hermes open, include all Hermes Nous managed tool presets, because this is the Hermes-native way to make the agent useful while routing through managed gateways instead of opening arbitrary direct web egress:

• nous-web
• nous-image
• nous-audio
• nous-browser
• nous-code

For OpenClaw open, keep capability through Brave/search plus curated direct public-data APIs. Do not add arbitrary browser/world egress as a normal default.

Credentialed/productivity/messaging services should remain explicit opt-ins through existing setup/channel selections rather than silently appearing in balanced:

• Slack, Discord, Telegram, WeChat, WhatsApp.
• Jira/Atlassian.
• Outlook/Microsoft Graph.
• Other authenticated SaaS providers.

Proposed PR Slice

I can follow this issue with a PR that does only the normal policy work:

1. Add the weather preset.
2. Add curated public-data/reference presets as needed.
3. Update tiers.yaml so balanced gets weather and open gets the curated common-data defaults.
4. Ensure Hermes open includes all Hermes Nous managed tool presets.
5. Add/adjust tests for tier resolution, policy validation, and agent-specific behavior.

The PR should only modify normal policy preset/tier behavior and its direct tests.

Alternatives Considered

• Add a new tier between balanced and open: rejected. We should avoid growing the tier model for this; the existing tiers can express the desired defaults.
• Put news sites or NewsAPI in defaults: rejected. That creates new content-ingestion and prompt-injection surfaces. Search/managed-web is the better default.
• Open arbitrary web egress in open: rejected. open should be useful, not world-open.

Acceptance Criteria

• restricted remains minimal and does not gain common-data egress.
• balanced includes safe weather support.
• open includes weather, curated public reference/data APIs, and all Hermes Nous managed tool presets for Hermes.
• News/current-events works through Brave/Nous web search paths, not direct news-site defaults.
• New normal presets do not use dangerous hosts, access: full, wildcard egress, or "/**" binaries.
• Tests cover tier resolution, agent-specific Hermes/OpenClaw behavior, and config validation.

Category

enhancement: platform

Checklist

• I searched existing issues and this is not a duplicate.
• This is a design proposal, not a "please build this" request.