Noometry

Model comparison

Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Mercury 2.5

Claude Sonnet 4.6 has enough public results to be ranked (#42); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

Last verified . 2 shared benchmarks.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic

50.1

Rank #42 Confirmed

Mercury 2.5 Inception

30.2

Unranked Sparse

Summary

  • They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher in 1 category and Mercury 2.5 in 0 categories; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in math, where Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads 51.9 to 22.4.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is ProofBench: 45% for Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 3% for Mercury 2.5.
  • Mercury 2.5 is cheaper at $0.04 / $0.15 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
  • Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 260K.

Side by side

Claude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
ProviderAnthropicInception
Noometry Index50.130.2
Released2026-02-172026-09-08
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window1M260K
Max output128K66K
Input $ / M tokens$3$0.04
Output $ / M tokens$15$0.15
Results tracked572

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Category by category

Coding Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.0 (#62), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
ALE-Bench1,327301.65
SWE-bench Verified75.2%—
DeepSWE29.9%—
FrontierCode24.3%—
LMArena WebDev1521—
SciCode46.8%—
WeirdML66.1%—
LMArena Coding1504—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 39.1 (#26), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
Terminal-Bench53.4%—
APEX-Agents43%—
OSWorld 2.09.3%—
DeepResearch Bench54.9%—
OSWorld72.1%—
ExploitBench23.6%—
GBAEval48.8%—
GDP.pdf18%—
LMArena Search1221—
Vending-Bench 27,204—

Reasoning Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.1 (#40), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
ARC-AGI-260.4%—
NYT Connections (extended)80.9%—
ARC-AGI-186.5%—
CritPt3.1%—
Chess Puzzles13%—
Thematic Generalization76.3%—
LMArena Hard Prompts1485—
Mystery Game Puzzles16%—
DTBench89.9%—
LMCA46.5%—
Epoch Capabilities Index152.25—
ForecastBench62—

Math Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.9 (#41), Mercury 2.5: 22.4

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
ProofBench45%3%
OTIS Mock AIME 2024-202585.8%—
LMArena Math1463—
FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set)32.4%—
FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1)8.3%—

Knowledge Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.6 (#60), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
GPQA Diamond87.4%—
SimpleQA Verified35.5%—
Vectara Hallucination Rate10.6%—
LMArena Expert1500—

Multimodal Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 38.0 (#61), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
LMArena Vision1283—
Blueprint-Bench 26.7%—
LMArena Document1482—

Multilingual Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 54.6 (#39), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
LMArena Non-English1440—
LMArena Chinese1491—
LMArena French1465—
LMArena German1428—
LMArena Japanese1419—
LMArena Korean1411—
LMArena Russian1440—
LMArena Spanish1465—

Instruction Following Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 77.6 (#23), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
LMArena Instruction Following1476—

Long Context Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 45.3 (#40), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
LMArena Longer Query1479—

Writing & Preference Not comparable

Claude Sonnet 4.6: 70.4 (#22), Mercury 2.5: —

BenchmarkClaude Sonnet 4.6Mercury 2.5
LMArena Text1458—
LMArena Creative Writing1435—
EQ-Bench Creative Writing1810—
EQ-Bench 41207—
LMArena Multi-Turn1464—

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Mercury 2.5?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 has enough public results to be ranked (#42); Mercury 2.5 does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Mercury 2.5?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper. It lists at $0.04 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.6 lists at $3 and $15.

Which has the bigger context window?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 260K.

How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Mercury 2.5 share?

2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.6 has 57 scored results on Noometry and Mercury 2.5 has 2.

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