Inception: Mercury 2
Analysis Summary
Inception: Mercury 2 sits in the Specialist tier on our leaderboard, ranked #77 of 525 published models on overall intelligence. At $0.250 input and $0.750 output per 1M tokens, it is among the most expensive on the market. It offers a standard large context window and supports tool use and function calling.
Editorial notes
Inception's Mercury 2 offers reasonable reasoning and instruction-following capability at competitive pricing ($0.25/$0.75 per million tokens) with tool use support — a decent mid-tier option for content and SEO tasks, though it trails the leading models on complex reasoning and coding.
Assessed April 23, 2026
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
Performance Profile
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 specialist 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.
