Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Mercury 2 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 51. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 41.1 against 19. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 46 to 10. Claude 3 Opus does hit back in multimodal & grounded, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Mercury 2 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 3 Opus is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude 3 Opus gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for Mercury 2.
Pick Mercury 2 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 3 Opus only becomes the better choice if multimodal & grounded is the priority or you need the larger 200K context window.
Mercury 2
63.7
Claude 3 Opus
48.1
Mercury 2
41.1
Claude 3 Opus
19
Mercury 2
68.3
Claude 3 Opus
70.3
Mercury 2
80.1
Claude 3 Opus
61.6
Mercury 2
57.2
Claude 3 Opus
45
Mercury 2
84
Claude 3 Opus
77
Mercury 2
79.7
Claude 3 Opus
69.8
Mercury 2
80.9
Claude 3 Opus
65.9
Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 51. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 46 and 10.
Mercury 2 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.2 versus 45. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 41.1 versus 19. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 65.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 80.1 versus 61.6. Inside this category, MuSR is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 63.7 versus 48.1. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 3 Opus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 70.3 versus 68.3. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 84 versus 77. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 69.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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