Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Mercury 2 finishes one point ahead overall, 65 to 64. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.
Mercury 2's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 80.1 against 72.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is MMMU-Pro, 66 to 82. Claude 4.1 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 4.1 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 4.1 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 4.1 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 4.1 Opus
58.7
Mercury 2
41.1
Claude 4.1 Opus
44
Mercury 2
68.3
Claude 4.1 Opus
80.7
Mercury 2
80.1
Claude 4.1 Opus
72.9
Mercury 2
57.2
Claude 4.1 Opus
57.6
Mercury 2
84
Claude 4.1 Opus
83
Mercury 2
79.7
Claude 4.1 Opus
81.8
Mercury 2
80.9
Claude 4.1 Opus
77.7
Mercury 2 is ahead overall, 65 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is MMMU-Pro, where the scores are 66 and 82.
Claude 4.1 Opus has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 57.6 versus 57.2. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 44 versus 41.1. Inside this category, HumanEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Mercury 2 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 80.9 versus 77.7. 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 72.9. 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 58.7. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 80.7 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 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude 4.1 Opus has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 81.8 versus 79.7. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.