Inception

Mercury 2

CTX128K

52Quality

Reasoning · Tools

Input$0.25/M

Output$0.75/M

Reasoning model for deliberate analysis, multi-step problem solving, and tool use

PaidProprietary799/1040

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InceptionTextCommon

Mercury 2

Reasoning model for deliberate analysis, multi-step problem solving, and tool use

mercury-2

Type: Text
Quality: 52 · Top 48% on the LMArena Text
Context window: 128,000 tokens
Max output: 50,000 tokens
Input price: $0.25 / 1M tokens
Output price: $0.75 / 1M tokens
Cache read: $0.025 / 1M tokens
Cache write: —
Released: Feb 24, 2026
Knowledge cutoff: Jan 2025
Takes in: Text
Puts out: Text
Reasoning: Yes
Tool calling: Yes
Structured output: Yes
File attachments: No
Access: Paid
License: Proprietary
Rarity: Common
Set number: 799/1040

Open Inception docs Quality 52 Where to run it 7 Evolution 1/2 Meet its creature Battle Trinity Large Thinking

Weights aren’t public. Use is governed by Inception’s terms. Specs from models.dev, last changed Oct 18, 2026. Official source: docs.inceptionlabs.ai.

How good is it?

Public leaderboard scores for Mercury 2, refreshed daily from Epoch AI and LMArena.

Top 48% of the 416 models on the LMArena Text: #202.

Quality is the share of a leaderboard’s models this one beats, from 0 to 100. Chat models are rated on Epoch AI’s Capabilities Index when it lists them, otherwise on LMArena; image and video models on LMArena’s image and video arenas.

Leaderboards

LMArena Text#202 of 416
People compare two anonymous answers and vote for the better one.1,355 rating
LMArena Text · Coding#182 of 411
The text arena’s coding prompts only.1,390 rating
LMArena Text · Creative writing#228 of 414
The text arena’s creative writing prompts only.1,289 rating
LMArena WebDev#141 of 144
Each model builds a web app from the same prompt; people pick the better one.1,171 rating

Scores from LMArena, licensed CC BY 4.0. Boards list models under their own names, so a close match is shown with the name it was scored under. Credits

Where to run it

7 providers sell Mercury 2 through an API. Prices are per million tokens, cheapest first.

CheapestInception$0.25 in · $0.75 out
From the labInception$0.25 in · $0.75 out

API providers

Provider	Input	Output	Context
InceptionOfficialCheapest paid`mercury-2`	$0.25	$0.75	128K
Kilo Gateway`inception/mercury-2`	$0.25	$0.75	128K
NanoGPT`mercury-2`	$0.25	$0.75	128K
OpenRouter`inception/mercury-2`	$0.25	$0.75	128K
Vercel AI Gateway`inception/mercury-2`	$0.25	$0.75	128K
Venice AI`mercury-2`	$0.31	$0.94	128K
AI/ML API`inception/mercury-2`	$0.34	$1.03	128K

From models.dev and Hugging Face, checked daily. Resellers’ listings can lag behind their price pages, so confirm with the provider before you commit.

Face off

Current text models from other labs at a similar output price.

Mercury 2

Mercury 2

How good is it?

Leaderboards

Where to run it

API providers

Face off

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