Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Mercury 2
Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Mercury 2 by Inception? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… scores 30.0 points higher (40.8 vs 10.8) but costs 5.9× as much to run the benchmark ($622 vs $105; premium vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when you need intelligence above 10.8, and Mercury 2 when 10.8 is enough.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) | Mercury 2 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 40.8 | 10.8 | −73.5% Mercury 2 is 73.5% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $622.28 | $104.94 | −83.1% Mercury 2 is 83.1% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 6.20s | 6.56s | +5.8% Mercury 2 is 5.8% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $2.00 / $10.0 | $0.25 / $0.75 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text |
Mercury 2 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 73.5% less intelligence, 83.1% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 5.8% slower end-to-end.
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
- Mercury 2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Mercury 2Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
Matchup
Compare something else
Agents:
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/mercury-2 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/mercury-2?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill