# Mercury 3

Mercury 3 is Inception's latest language model in our dataset, released Oct 19, 2026. Proprietary, API access only. Inception's diffusion-based language model with a 1M-token context, launched Oct 19, 2026 and billed at launch for half its list price. Verified against vendor sources on Oct 26, 2026.

Last verified: 2026-10-26 · Evidence: Reported · Canonical: https://theagenticweekly.com/models/mercury-3 · JSON: https://theagenticweekly.com/api/models/mercury-3

## Key facts

| Fact | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Inception |  |
| Released | Oct 19, 2026 | https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 |
| Context window | 1,000,000 tokens (1M). Stated as 1M tokens, up from 260K for Mercury 2.5. | https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 |
| Licence | Proprietary (API). Available through the Inception API Platform, OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel; no weights are offered. | https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 |
| Pricing | $0.1 in / $0.35 out per 1M tokens. Launch price, 50% off the list price of $0.20 input and $0.70 output. Cached tokens are 90% off the input price. | https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3 |

## Vendor claims and neutral signals

- Inception says Mercury 3 outperforms GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on its benchmarks while running 4-8x faster at 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs. These are vendor claims.

## What we tested

Nothing yet. We have not run Mercury 3 ourselves, so every fact here is Reported from the sources below.

## Not verified, left out

- Parameter count was not disclosed.
- Launch pricing has no stated end date.
- OpenRouter's listing shows Oct 16, 2026 (early access); we use Inception's own Oct 19 launch date.

## Sources

- [Inception blog: Introducing Mercury 3](https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3)

Data licence: CC BY 4.0. Data: Agentic Weekly (https://theagenticweekly.com), CC BY 4.0.