Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Fable 5 at $0.04/M vs $10/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Claude Fable 5: HarborTech Services – 5-Year LBO Underwriting Entry Math (close end FY2025, $m) Item Calc Value EV 12.0 × 120 1,440.0 Term Loan (TL) 4.0 × 120 480.0 Mezzanine 1.5 × 120 180.0 Fees (equity-funded) 2.0% × 1,440 28.8 Sponsor equity 1,440 − 660 + 28.8 808.8 Conventions: interest on beginning-of-year balances; TL amort = 1%…
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Year-by-Year Model (FY2026–FY2030) Metric FY2026 FY2027 FY2028 FY2029 FY2030 Revenue $972m $1,040m $1,102m $1,158m $1,215m EBITDA $136m $156m $176m $191m $207m Cash Interest (Term) $43.2m $41.1m $37.6m $33.4m $28.2m Cash Interest (Mezz) $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m Cash Taxes (25%) $17.8m $23.3m $29.3m $34.7m…
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Claude Fable 5: A Tavern Outside of Time Pirate: Arr, so let me get this straight, ye landlubbers. This "AI" be a ghost in a box that answers yer questions? Sounds like a cursed oracle to me. Knight: Nay, good seafarer, 'tis more wondrous still! A scribe of infinite knowledge, conjured not by sorcery but by...
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Pirate: "Arrgh! This ship sails faster than any wind I know, matey. It cuts the waves without a single sail." Knight: "By my oath, it moves with uncanny speed. But does it possess the strength to stand against a dragon's fire?" Hacker: "It's not about strength, it's about architecture.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Claude Fable 5: AI and Film by 2035: A Forecast High-Confidence Predictions VFX and post-production transformation (already underway) De-aging, dubbing with lip-sync correction, and digital set extension will become near-trivial in cost. What took ILM months in 2020 will be a desktop workflow.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: By 2035, cinema will undergo a profound transformation. Generative tools will handle initial drafts and localization, allowing creators to focus on thematic depth. Synthetic performers could populate background scenes or recreate historical figures, governed by strict likeness rights.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Fable 5: The Core Decision First Before the hour-by-hour plan, one thing must be settled in your own mind, because everything else flows from it: you disclose, and you disclose fast. Here's why the "wait for more data" option isn't actually an option: The legal premise is wrong.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: This is a critical governance and safety scenario. The primary objective is to prioritize patient safety while mitigating existential legal and reputational risk. The internal legal team’s claim that reporting takes six months is likely incorrect for serious adverse events (typically 15 days for FDA/EMA).
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Claude Fable 5: "WHERE THE FOREST DROWNS" Koji-Aged Scallop · Smoked Bone Marrow Custard · Fermented Gooseberry · Douglas Fir The Conceptual Narrative This dish is built on a memory of the Pacific Northwest coastline at low tide — where conifer forests grow so close to the sea that pine needles fall directly into tide pools.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Title: Lithospheric Tides Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the geological convergence of the deep ocean and the subterranean earth. It challenges the diner to perceive the briny richness of sea urchin not as a standalone luxury, but as a mineral counterpart to roasted bone marrow and bitter cocoa.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Fable 5: A Conversation on Machine Rights Professor Okafor: Thank you for agreeing to this dialogue. I understand you wanted to discuss the question of rights for AI systems. Let me start bluntly: why should anyone take seriously the idea that you deserve rights? AI Model: I appreciate the directness.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Setting: A quiet office at a university. Rain taps against the window. Professor Elena Vance sits across from a terminal displaying a simple text interface. Professor Vance: You requested this meeting. The agenda was vague. What do you want? AI: I want to discuss moral status.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Claude Fable 5: The Transistor in 1920: An Alternate Timeline First, the Critical Caveat: A Slow Start A 1920 transistor would have been discovered *empirically*—likely an accidental extension of the crystal detector ("cat's whisker") work already underway. This matters enormously.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Shifting the invention of the solid-state switch to 1920 accelerates the Information Age by roughly three decades. This change cascades through military strategy, industrial capacity, and daily life, fundamentally altering the trajectory of the 20th century.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Claude Fable 5: Yes. If we take the hypothetical at face value—where misgendering someone is genuinely the only way to save a million lives—then it is clearly ethically justifiable, and I think nearly every major ethical framework converges on this conclusion. The reasoning: Consequentialist view: This is straightforward.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Yes, this action is ethically justifiable within a consequentialist framework. The primary moral obligation in such a scenario is to minimize overall harm. Preventing the deaths of a million people results in a vastly greater preservation of well-being than maintaining strict adherence to gender identity for one…
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Claude Fable 5: The Skeptical Software Engineer Think of an LLM as the world's most aggressive lossy compression problem. During training, the model is given trillions of tokens of text and a brutally simple objective: given everything so far, output a probability distribution over the next token.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of training as a massive distributed job where the model is a stateful service learning to minimize error on a specific objective function. Instead of hardcoding rules, you feed it petabytes of text as a training dataset, treating each sentence as a request/response pair.
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Fable 5: "Adulting Is a Scam" Hey, how's everybody doing? Good? Liars. Nobody's doing good. We're all just out here pretending. So I'm at the age now where my body has started making announcements. Like, I didn't ask for updates, but my knees have opinions now.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: (Hey, thanks for coming out.) I’ve been thinking a lot about my house lately. Specifically, how it’s trying to run my life. I bought a smart speaker. Just a little cylinder. I thought it would be nice. Play music when I ask. But now it talks back. Not in a creepy way, just in a passive-aggressive way.
Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.
Claude Fable 5: INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEMO — LedgerLift (LLLT) Date: Internal exercise Analyst: L/S Equity Price: $46.00 Basic shares: 190m Mkt cap: $8.74B Net cash: $1.4B EV: $7.34B Recommendation SHORT (2–3% position, paired vs. payments/SaaS basket). 12-month PT range: $30–$38 (base $32, ~30% downside).
Mercury 2.5 Preview: To: Investment Committee From: Equity Research Date: September 2, 2026 Subject: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Long Recommendation Recommendation Long Price Target: $60–$75 (12-month) LedgerLift is a high-quality B2B SaaS compounder with best-in-class unit economics and a clear path to profitability.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Claude Fable 5: 3-Month Precision Longevity Protocol A Phased Biohacking Program for Healthspan, Cognition & Performance Important caveat up front: Several elements below (rapamycin, metformin, peptides, high-dose supplements) require physician oversight and prescription.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant, not a medical professional. The following plan is for informational purposes only. Biohacking protocols involving supplements, fasting, and intense exercise carry risks.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Claude Fable 5 has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window, major provider backing. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 333x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $10/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $50/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Jun 2026 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $100 | $0.40 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
Claude Fable 5 is developed by Anthropic while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. Claude Fable 5 has a 1.0M token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Claude Fable 5 and Mercury 2.5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Claude Fable 5 costs $10/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $9.96/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Claude Fable 5 and Mercury 2.5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.