Pending benchmarksTracking since Oct 19, 2026
Is Mercury 3 state of the art?Pending benchmarks.Announced Oct 19, 2026; no independent results yet.
Inception's diffusion LLM with a 1M-token context, live on the Inception API, OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel.
Announced facts
The details so far
- Lab
- Inception
- Announced
- Oct 19, 2026
- API
- Live · inception/mercury-3
- Open weights
- Unknown
- Available
- Inception API Platform, OpenRouter (inception/mercury-3), Baseten and Vercel
- Context
- 1,000,000 tokens (OpenRouter listing and lab posts)
- Launch price
- $0.10 in / $0.35 out per 1M tokens (50% off launch pricing; OpenRouter matches)
- Type
- Diffusion LLM (lab wording)
- Open weights
- Not mentioned in the announcement posts
- Earlier models
- Separate from Mercury, Mercury 2 and Mercury Decide
Tags marked unsure are not stated on the lab's own pages.
Next steps
What would let us call it
Verdicts use only independent boards we already track. Two consecutive snapshots are required before any crown.
- Publicly announced with a source
- Usable by the public (API or weights)
- Listed on an independent board we track
- Enough results for a rank in a category
- Holds across two snapshots (crowns only)
Self-reported
What the lab claims
Self-reported. Shown for context; not used in any verdict.
Lab claim: more than 1000 tokens/sec.
Lab claim: outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on quality (self-reported; OpenRouter notes IFBench, GPQA Diamond and SWE-Bench Atlas).
Receipts
Sources
LABStefano Ermon announcement on X (1/4)x.com/StefanoErmon/status/2112222911218291051 · Oct 19, 2026LABStefano Ermon availability and pricing on X (4/4)x.com/StefanoErmon/status/2112222921955709337 · Oct 19, 2026LABIntroducing Mercury 3 (Inception blog)inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 · Oct 19, 2026PRESSOpenRouter listing post on Xx.com/OpenRouter/status/2112225779782398131 · Oct 19, 2026Tracking continues until an independent board lists it.