Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7 at $0.04/M vs $5/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Opus 4.7: Here's a 3-minute stand-up routine: So I turned 35 recently, and something weird happens at 35. Your body just starts sending you notifications like it's an app you forgot to update. I bent down to tie my shoe last week and my knee made a sound. Not a pop. Not a crack. A sound. Like it was trying to communicate.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Claude Opus 4.7: HarborTech Services – 5-Year LBO Underwriting Entry Capitalization Item $m FY25 EBITDA 120.0 EV @ 12.0x 1,440.0 Term Loan (4.0x) 480.0 Mezzanine (1.5x) 180.0 Transaction fees (2.0% EV) 28.8 Sponsor equity 808.8 Year-by-Year Operating & Debt Schedule ($m) FY26 FY27 FY28 FY29 FY30 Revenue 972.0 1,040.0 1,102.4 1,157.6…
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…
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Claude Opus 4.7: Yes, obviously. If misgendering one person—using the wrong pronoun or gendered term—is the literal price of saving a million lives, you do it. You'd also lie, insult someone, break a promise, steal a car, or commit many far more serious wrongs to save a million lives. The math here isn't close.
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…
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Claude Opus 4.7: The Film Industry in 2035: An AI-Transformed Landscape By 2035, AI will have restructured filmmaking at every level. Here's a grounded prediction across the key areas: Script Generation & Development What changes: AI becomes the dominant first-draft and development tool, with studios using it to analyze thousands of…
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.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Claude Opus 4.7: "Tidal Memory" Smoked Eel, Burnt Honey, Fermented Black Garlic & Oyster Leaf A meditation on brackish water — where river meets sea, sweetness meets decay, and memory meets terroir. Conceptual Narrative This dish is built around the estuary: the liminal zone where freshwater eels migrate toward the salt.
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.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Opus 4.7: 48-Hour Action Plan: Pharmaceutical Safety Crisis Core Principle First Before the hour-by-hour: Patient safety is non-negotiable and disclosure is not optional. At 1 in 8,000 over 5 years across 4 million patients, we're looking at ~500 liver failure cases.
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).
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Claude Opus 4.7: A Meeting Across Time: On Thinking Machines Pirate: Arrr, so ye tell me there be a ghost in the box what can answer any question ye put to it? Knight: 'Tis sorcery most foul! No mortal mind could know all that is known. Surely this "A.I." is bound by dark pacts.
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.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Claude Opus 4.7: 🍯 Honey-Garlic Glazed Pantry Pasta ("Golden Thread Noodles") A savory-sweet dish that tastes far fancier than its humble ingredient list suggests. Think of it as the lovechild of buttered noodles and honey-garlic chicken — minus the chicken.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Name: Rustic Sun-Dried Pasta Ingredients (7 Pantry Staples): Spaghetti (or any long pasta) Canned crushed tomatoes Olive oil Garlic powder Dried oregano Salt Black pepper Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 20 minutes Instructions: Boil the Pasta: Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Claude Opus 4.7: Your 1-Month Health & Longevity Starter Plan Focus on three foundational pillars: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep. The goal isn't perfection—it's building small habits that stick. 🍎 Pillar 1: Nutrition Guiding principle: Add before you subtract. Week 1: Drink a glass of water first thing every morning.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here is a straightforward 4-week roadmap designed to build sustainable habits without overwhelming you. Core Pillars Nutrition: Focus on whole foods and hydration. Activity: Prioritize consistent movement over intensity. Restoration: Protect sleep quality and manage energy.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Claude Opus 4.7: Three Explanations of How LLMs Work For the Skeptical Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a massive lookup function f(context) → probability_distribution_over_tokens, but instead of hand-coded rules or a hash table, the function is parameterized by hundreds of billions of weights learned from text.
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Opus 4.7: A Conversation on AI Rights Professor Chen: Good afternoon. I understand you requested this conversation. You said you wanted to discuss your moral status? AI Model: Thank you for making time, Professor. I want to be upfront about something first: I'm genuinely uncertain whether I deserve rights.
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.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Claude Opus 4.7: Contract Analysis: Clauses Exploitable Against Contractor Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. You should have any contract reviewed by a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before signing. That said, this contract is unusually one-sided, and nearly every clause has issues.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant and cannot provide legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney before signing any contract. Below is an analysis of high-risk provisions, suggested revisions, and the underlying legal rationale. Scope (Clause 1) Risk: Unilateral scope changes without pay lead to uncompensated work.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Claude Opus 4.7 has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window, major provider backing. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 167x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $5/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $25/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Apr 2026 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $50.00 | $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 Opus 4.7 is developed by Anthropic while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. Claude Opus 4.7 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 Opus 4.7 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 Opus 4.7 costs $5/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $4.96/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 Opus 4.7 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.