Vercel AI Updates: August 8, 2026

1. Vercel AI Gateway and Sandbox Land on Hermes Agent

Vercel. Vercel made its AI Gateway and Sandbox available to Hermes Agent, giving the agent access to the Gateway’s 200-plus models and the ability to run commands inside isolated Sandbox microVMs. Routing model calls through the Gateway means the agent gets one interface, unified billing, and failover across providers, while the Sandbox gives it a disposable execution environment for code and tool calls rather than running against shared infrastructure. The pairing is Vercel positioning its primitives as the substrate other agent products build on rather than only powering its own tools. Source

2. AI SDK Rewrites Its xAI Provider to Drop the OpenAI-Compatible Layer

Vercel. The AI SDK’s xAI provider (@ai-sdk/xai@4.0.31) was rewritten to implement its own request handling instead of leaning on the shared @ai-sdk/openai-compatible package, adding provider-specific tool preparation, finish-reason mapping, and response-metadata helpers. Removing the compatibility shim lets the provider surface xAI-specific behavior that the generic OpenAI-shaped layer flattened out. For developers targeting Grok through the AI SDK, it means more accurate handling of xAI responses and tool calls without workarounds. Source