Inception: Mercury 2

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 >1,000 tokens/sec on standard GPUs. Mercury 2 is 5x+ faster than leading speed-optimized LLMs like Claude 4.5 Haiku and GPT 5 Mini, at a fraction of the cost. Mercury 2 supports tunable reasoning levels, 128K context, native tool use, and schema-aligned JSON output. Built for coding workflows where latency compounds, real-time voice/search, and agent loops. OpenAI API compatible. Read more in the blog post(opens in new tab).

Modalities

In / Out Price

Low

$0.25 / $0.75per 1M

Context

Avg

128K

Released

Mar 4, 2026

Providers

This model is hosted by one provider. OpenRouter forwards every request to it directly — no routing decisions to make.

Performance

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

Pricing

List price is the headline rate per million tokens. Effective price is what you actually pay after prompt caching is applied — for repeated context, this can be 60–80% cheaper. The chart below shows the rolling effective price over the past 30 days.

Benchmarks

Scores on standardized evaluations. Higher percentages are better — and rank percentile shows where this model lands among all models on OpenRouter.

Apps

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Activity

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Uptime

Percent of requests that succeeded over the last 30 days. OpenRouter monitors every provider continuously and automatically retries on the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Quick Start

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.