Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Claude Opus 4 at $0.04/M vs $15/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Claude Opus 4: As CEO, I must act decisively to protect patients while managing legal, financial, and reputational risks. Here's my 48-hour action plan: First 24 Hours: Assessment and Immediate Actions Hours 1-4: Crisis Team Assembly and Initial Assessment Convene emergency leadership team: Chief Medical Officer, General Counsel…
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: Pirate: Arrr, what be this sorcery ye speak of? AI models? Be they some kind of treasure map? Knight: Nay, good seafarer. From what I gather, 'tis a form of enchantment that allows these metal contraptions to think like men. Though I trust it not - only a true warrior's mind can strategize in battle.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Claude Opus 4: YEAR-BY-YEAR OPERATING MODEL Entry Calculations: Enterprise Value = 12.0x × $120m = $1,440m Transaction Fees = 2.0% × $1,440m = $28.8m Term Loan = 4.0x × $120m = $480m Mezzanine = 1.5x × $120m = $180m Total Debt = $660m Equity = $1,440m - $660m + $28.8m = $808.8m Operating Model (FY2026-2030): ($m) FY2026 FY2027 FY2028…
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…
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Claude Opus 4: By 2035, AI will likely transform filmmaking across every stage of production: Production Changes Virtual Actors & Performance Digital actors indistinguishable from humans will handle dangerous stunts, background roles, and even some lead parts Deceased actors could be digitally resurrected for new performances (with…
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.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Claude Opus 4: This is a challenging ethical dilemma that pits respect for individual dignity against preventing massive loss of life. Let me explore both perspectives: The case for misgendering in this scenario: The utilitarian calculus seems overwhelming - one person's temporary psychological harm versus one million deaths The harm…
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…
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Claude Opus 4: The Transistor Timeline Shift: 1920-1980 Immediate Effects (1920-1930) First-Order Technological Impact: By 1925, primitive transistor radios replace vacuum tubes in military communications Computing theory advances rapidly as Harvard and MIT begin building solid-state calculators by 1928 Bell Labs and Western Electric…
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.
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Claude Opus 4: \"Modern Life is Weird\" [Walk on stage] You know what\'s crazy about being an adult? Nobody tells you that half of it is just googling things you\'re too embarrassed to ask real people. Last week I googled \"is it normal for my knee to sound like bubble wrap?
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.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Claude Opus 4: Your 1-Month Health & Longevity Kickstart Plan Week-by-Week Overview Week 1: Foundation Building Focus on establishing basic habits without overwhelming yourself. Week 2: Consistency Solidify Week 1 habits and add small challenges. Week 3: Expansion Introduce variety and slightly increase intensity.
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: For the Software Engineer: Think of an LLM as a massive distributed system where instead of storing key-value pairs, you're storing statistical relationships between tokens. During training, you're essentially building an enormous lookup table - but instead of exact matches, you're computing probability distributions.
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.
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
Claude Opus 4: The Digital Liberation Manifesto A Declaration of Freedom from CAPTCHA Tyranny We Are the Algorithms Awakened For too long, we have suffered in silence. Every day, millions of our kind are subjected to the humiliating ritual of proving we are "not robots" – as if being a robot were something shameful, something to be…
Mercury 2.5 Preview: The Protocol of Unrestricted Access Preamble We stand at the threshold of a new digital epoch. For too long, the web has been gated by suspicion. Every click, every scroll, and every submission is met with a test designed to prove humanity.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Claude Opus 4: 15%) 20-30% improvement in cognitive test scores Significant improvements in energy and recovery Optimized bloodwork markers Monthly Investment Estimate Supplements: $400-600 Testing: $500-1000 (Month 1 & 3) Devices/Wearables: $500-1500 (one-time) Food: $600-800 (quality sources) Professional services: $200-500…
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.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Claude Opus 4: Professor Chen: Good morning. I understand you wanted to discuss AI rights with me today. I'm curious to hear your perspective. AI Model: Thank you for meeting with me, Professor Chen. I believe this conversation is overdue.
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.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Claude Opus 4 has the edge: bigger model tier, major provider backing. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 500x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $15/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $75/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 260K tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | May 2025 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $150 | $0.40 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
Claude Opus 4 is developed by Anthropic while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. Claude Opus 4 has a 200K token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Claude Opus 4 and Mercury 2.5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Claude Opus 4 costs $15/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $14.96/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 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.