Inception: Mercury 2
Analysis Summary
Mercury 2 from Inception is a mid-tier model with an intelligence index of 25.3 and a coding index of 30.6, placing it in the competent but not standout range for reasoning and software tasks. Tool use and function calling are supported, and its agentic index of 48.6 suggests it can handle basic multi-step workflows. Pricing at $0.25 input and $0.75 output is competitive for its capability level.
For businesses, Mercury 2 suits lighter coding assistance, structured output generation, and tool-augmented automation where cost efficiency is a priority. The 128K context window is adequate for most document tasks but constrains use cases involving very long codebases or extended conversations. The text-only modality and absence of vision limit its applicability in multimodal workflows.
It is a reasonable choice for teams that need affordable, reliable tool use without requiring frontier reasoning. Teams with more demanding requirements, particularly around coding depth or agentic reliability, will find better options at similar or slightly higher price points.
Assessed June 17, 2026
Editorial notes
Inception Mercury 2 offers competent reasoning and coding with tool use and function calling at low cost, though its 128K context window and text-only modality limit its versatility for broader business workflows.
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 #105 of 385 AI models we track for overall intelligence, #94 of 293 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 48% 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
Benchmark Scores
Intelligence
Technical
Content
Benchmark data from Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face
How does Inception: Mercury 2 stack up?
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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.
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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).
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.
