Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) vs Mercury 2.5
Which is better for the money: Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) by Anthropic or Mercury 2.5 by Inception? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh)
Mercury 2.5 vs Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh): 70.1% less intelligence, 20.0% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 94.1% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) | Mercury 2.5 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 41.2 | 12.3 | −70.1% Mercury 2.5 is 70.1% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $157.58 | $189.17 | +20.0% Mercury 2.5 is 20.0% more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 69.98s | 4.14s | −94.1% Mercury 2.5 is 94.1% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.10 / $0.50 | $0.25 / $0.75 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh) is on today's frontier: nothing is both smarter and cheaper.
- Mercury 2.5 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Terra (Medium) scores 41.30 for $175.
Claude Haiku 5.5 (Xhigh)Mercury 2.5Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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