Inception: Mercury 2
Analysis Summary
Mercury 2 is Inception's mid-tier model with an intelligence index of 32.8 and an agentic index of 48.6. Tool use and function calling are supported across a 128K context window. Instruction following is adequate, and the model performs reasonably on general reasoning tasks for its price class.
For businesses, it fits content generation, SEO automation, and structured output tasks where cost matters more than frontier reasoning. The coding index of 30.6 is limited, so software engineering work is not a strong suit. Long-context reasoning scores are below average, which limits its usefulness for document-heavy workflows.
At $0.25 input and $0.75 output per million tokens, it is competitively priced for the capability it delivers. Teams running high-volume content or SEO pipelines on a budget will find it a practical option, though models like Qwen3.5-9B offer comparable or better value at lower cost.
Assessed June 6, 2026
Editorial notes
Mercury 2 from Inception delivers good general reasoning and instruction following at a low price point, with tool use and function calling, suited to content and SEO workflows where cost efficiency is a priority.
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
Performance Profile
How Inception: Mercury 2 compares
Inception: Mercury 2 ranks #93 of 378 AI models we track for overall intelligence, #85 of 315 for coding, #86 of 289 for agentic tasks. Its 128K-token context window is larger than 43% of the models we list. At $0.25 per million input tokens it is cheaper than 47% of comparable models.
About Inception: Mercury 2
Mercury 2 is an extremely fast reasoning LLM, and the first reasoning diffusion LLM (dLLM). Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving..
Capabilities
Performance Indices
Source: Artificial Analysis
Benchmark Scores
Intelligence
Technical
Content
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
How does Inception: Mercury 2 stack up?
Compare side-by-side with other professional models.
Model Information
| OpenRouter ID |
inception/mercury-2
|
| Provider | inception |
| Release Date | March 4, 2026 |
| Context Length | 128,000 tokens |
| Max Completion | 50,000 tokens |
| Status | Active |
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.25 | $0.000250 |
| Output | $0.75 | $0.000750 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics, refreshed every 30 minutes.
Leaderboard Categories
External Resources
Frequently asked questions about Inception: Mercury 2
How much does Inception: Mercury 2 cost?
Inception: Mercury 2 costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens.
What is the context window of Inception: Mercury 2?
Inception: Mercury 2 has a context window of 128,000 tokens (128K).
Is Inception: Mercury 2 good for coding?
On our coding benchmark index, Inception: Mercury 2 ranks #85 of 315 models, placing it in the broader range of the field for code generation and debugging.
What can Inception: Mercury 2 do?
Inception: Mercury 2 supports tool use and function calling.
Who created Inception: Mercury 2?
Inception: Mercury 2 is developed by Inception and was released on March 4, 2026.
