← the radar · ✳ model tracker
Mercury 3
● liveLive — Oct 19; diffusion LLM; launch price $0.10/$0.35 per 1M, which Inception says is 50% off; OpenRouter and Vercel list the same, cached input $0.01; 1M context, 131K max output per the catalogs; on the Inception API, OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel; Inception says it is over 40x the size of Mercury 1, runs at 1,000+ tokens/s and beats GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 on quality (its own claims). On the board as live since 2026-10-19 — the watchers keep tracking it: lineup changes, pricing moves and deprecations all alert.
No reading from our side yetLive model status →
Watch for Inception’s next model, free →Launch report (PDF)
Timeline
Inception released Mercury 3, its largest diffusion language model, on October 19.
Mercury 3: quick answers
Is Mercury 3 out?
Yes. Mercury 3 is live and has been since October 19, 2026.
When was Mercury 3 released?
October 19, 2026.
Who makes Mercury 3?
Inception. ArtificialWatch also tracks Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2 and Next Mercury (3.5 / 4) from Inception.
More from Inception
Know the minute Inception's next model drops. Free.
A free Chrome push the second it's confirmed on a public API, email about 15 minutes later. Texts or a phone call on paid plans.
- Free forever
- No card
- Unsubscribe in one click
Also: the wire · the bench index · our track record