Mercury 2.5 Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis
Model summary
Mercury 2.5 is above average in intelligence and well priced when comparing to other models of similar price. It's also notably fast and fairly concise. The model supports text input, outputs text, and has a 260k tokens context window.
Mercury 2.5 scores 12 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, placing it above average among comparable models (median: 12). When evaluating the Intelligence Index, it generated 35M tokens, which is fairly concise in comparison to the median of 84M.
Pricing for Mercury 2.5 is $0.25 per 1M input tokens (moderately priced, median: $0.25) and $0.75 per 1M output tokens (moderately priced, median: $0.90). On average, it costs $0.06 per task to evaluate Mercury 2.5 on the Intelligence Index.
At 770 tokens per second, Mercury 2.5 is notably fast (110).
Metrics are compared against models of the same class:
- Non-reasoning models → compared only with other non-reasoning models
- Reasoning models → compared across both reasoning and non-reasoning
- Open weights models → compared only with other open weights models of the same size class:
- Tiny: ≤4B parameters
- Small: 4B–40B parameters
- Medium: 40B–150B parameters
- Large: >150B parameters
- Proprietary models → compared across proprietary and open weights models of the same price range, using a blended 3:1 input/output price ratio:
- <$0.15 per 1M tokens
- $0.15–$1 per 1M tokens
- >$1 per 1M tokens
Highlights
IntelligenceUpdated
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index by Open Weights / Proprietary
Intelligence Evaluations
AA-Briefcase v1.1Updated
AA-Briefcase Elo
AA-Omniscience
AA-Omniscience Index
Intelligence Index Comparisons
Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Intelligence Index Task
Token Use
Output Tokens per Intelligence Index Task
Cost
Cost per Intelligence Index Task
Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
Pricing: Cache Hit, Input, and Output
Context Window
Context Window
Speed
Measured by Output Speed (tokens per second)
Output Speed
Time per Intelligence Index Task
Latency
Measured by Time (seconds) to First Token
Latency: Time To First Answer Token
End-to-End Response Time
Seconds to output 500 tokens, calculated based on time to first token, 'thinking' time for reasoning models, and output speed
End-to-End Response Time
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Mercury 2.5
Mercury 2.5 was released on September 8, 2026.
Mercury 2.5 was created by Inception.
Mercury 2.5 scores 12 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, placing it above average among other reasoning models in a similar price tier (median: 12).
Mercury 2.5 generates output at 770.4 tokens per second (based on Inception's API), which is well above average compared to other reasoning models in a similar price tier (median: 110.3 t/s).
Mercury 2.5 has a time to first token (TTFT) of 2.91s (based on Inception's API), which is somewhat higher than average compared to other reasoning models in a similar price tier (median: 2.22s).
Mercury 2.5 costs $0.25 per 1M input tokens (better than average, median: $0.25) and $0.75 per 1M output tokens (better than average, median: $0.90), based on Inception's API.
Mercury 2.5 costs $0.25 per 1M input tokens and $0.75 per 1M output tokens (based on Inception's API). For a blended rate (7:2:1 cache hit/input/output ratio), this is $0.14 per 1M tokens. Pricing may vary by provider. Compare provider pricing
When evaluated on the Intelligence Index, Mercury 2.5 generated 35M output tokens, which is better than average compared to other reasoning models in a similar price tier (median: 84M).
Yes, Mercury 2.5 is a reasoning model. It uses extended thinking or chain-of-thought reasoning to work through complex problems before providing an answer.
Mercury 2.5 supports text input.
Mercury 2.5 supports text output.
No, Mercury 2.5 does not support image input. It can only process text.
No, Mercury 2.5 is not multimodal. It only supports text input.
Mercury 2.5 has a context window of 260k tokens. This determines how much text and conversation history the model can process in a single request.
No, Mercury 2.5 is proprietary. The model weights are not publicly available.
Mercury 2.5 is a proprietary model and Inception has not disclosed the model size or parameter count.
Mercury 2.5 achieves a score of 12 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. This composite benchmark evaluates models across reasoning, knowledge, mathematics, and coding.