Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs Mercury 2.5
Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or Mercury 2.5 by Inception? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Trade-off
Verdict
Depends on your budget
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… scores 28.5 points higher (40.8 vs 12.3) but costs 2.9× as much to run the benchmark ($622 vs $218; premium vs mid-range cost classes). Pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when the extra intelligence is worth the premium, otherwise Mercury 2.5.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) | Mercury 2.5 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 40.8 | 12.3 | −69.9% Mercury 2.5 is 69.9% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $622.28 | $218.11 | −64.9% Mercury 2.5 is 64.9% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 6.20s | 4.24s | −31.6% Mercury 2.5 is 31.6% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $2.00 / $10.0 | $0.25 / $0.75 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text |
Mercury 2.5 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 69.9% less intelligence, 64.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 31.6% faster 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 2.5 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback)Mercury 2.5Today's Pareto frontierEvery other model
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