# Mercury 2.5

Inception, released 2026-09-24

**Verdict: conditional.** Conditional. Mercury 2.5 is Inception's diffusion LLM, and raw output speed is the reason to pick it: Artificial Analysis ranks it among the fastest models it measures, and it ships tunable reasoning, parallel tool calls and structured outputs. The deciding caveat is quality: Artificial Analysis places its intelligence just below the median, and Inception's parity claims name no benchmark. Suits latency-bound voice agents, RAG pipelines and coding subagents, not hard reasoning. Last verified 2026-10-02.

## Pricing

- Input: $0.20 / 1M tokens
- Output: $0.75 / 1M tokens
- Context: 260K ctx; 80% off at launch: $0.04/$0.15

## Strengths

- Latency-bound work: Artificial Analysis measures 636.5 output tokens per second, #3 of 175 models; Inception cites 1,107 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs
- Agent subtasks needing tool use: parallel tool calls, schema-aligned JSON and a reasoning_effort parameter
- Search agents, RAG pipelines, voice agents and coding subagents, the use cases Inception names
- Long inputs up to 260K tokens with up to 65,536 output tokens
- Hard reasoning where quality beats speed: Intelligence Index 12, which Artificial Analysis labels below average among reasoning models in a similar price tier (median 12)
- Image, audio or video input; text only
- Time-to-first-token-critical calls: AA measures 3.87 s TTFT vs a 2.20 s median

## Benchmarks

- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 12 (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mercury-2-5)
- Artificial Analysis output speed (tokens/s): 636.5 (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mercury-2-5)

## Sources

- [Inception: Introducing Mercury 2.5](https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-2-5)
- [Artificial Analysis: Mercury 2.5 (also Inception docs and launch post)](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mercury-2-5)
- [Inception models page (launch discount, no end date stated)](https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started/models)

Canonical: https://neomanex.com/models/mercury-2-5