OpenRouter lists Inception: Mercury 3

OpenRouter's model catalog added "Inception: Mercury 3" (inception/mercury-3) on October 16, 2026, with a context length of 1,000,000 tokens and no expiration date. That is a catalog listing, not an announcement from Inception.

The TLDR AI newsletter of October 20 describes Mercury 3 as a diffusion-based language model from Inception Labs. It reports, without detail, that the model outperformed GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on multiple benchmarks while generating over 1,000 tokens per second. These are claims relayed by a newsletter, not independently verified.