- Serial (produces an incredibly exciting response which ends in a cliffhanger that withholds the answer)
- Prequel (instead of responding, it provides the full backstory leading up to your question)
- Yarn (maximizes output tokens by taking a long winding route to your answer)
- Head Canon (answers using its own entertainingly weird theories about the input)
- Overstory (your answer is interwoven with the answers from eight other users into a larger and deeply intertwined meta-answer)
- Oeuvre (for every question, it produces a diverse but cohesive body of work across a variety of mediums, each one a heartbreaking masterpiece in its own right)
The Dario Legendarium is definitely going to be a fun piece of work for historians to interrogate as to the origin of this age. The relative personalities of the orgs involved show somewhat in their naming: {o1,4o,3.5,5.5} vs. {Haiku,Sonnet,Opus} vs. {3.1, 3.5-pro, 3.5-flash, 3.5-flash-lite} vs. {3.7, 3.7-plus, 3.7-max}
It's a pity that Samsung isn't in the mix. I would have liked to have used a model named Samsung Galaxy S10+ 5G Lite.
Anthropic intentionally degrading responses shows you they're also focusing on the wrong things. Rather than producing the best model possible, they're nerfing their models' capabilities.
"Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.
Tractatus - highly aware of its limitations and refuses to speak about too many topics. Really likes numbering statements. Unusable due to a context window bug which is patched after considerable delay.
I miss the days when the dropdown menu (in their consumer product with a billion users) asked me if I wanted to use o3, 4o, 4o-mini, o4-mini, gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, or gpt-4.5 (Research Preview).
I like "Proverb" as smaller than Haiku too, Aphorism is also good. But seriously I want Anthropic to up its small model game. Haiku is not competitive, Deepseek v4 flash outperforms my uses for about $0.10 / $0.20. Whereas Haiku 4.5 is $1/$5.
IMO Anthropic should just play the game at all the price tiers because it otherwise forces people to go elsewhere. I would probably pay for a "Proverb"/"Aphorism" class model that was worse than Deepseek at the same price just to stay in the ecosystem, if given the option.
(Note: I also see Google seem to make the same mistake, they actually do have competitive models in Gemma family but they don't make them available via the API. So there may be some reason for this.)
This is a well executed joke, from the design to the shortness to the being on point to the abrupt punchlines when one looks at the lower ones and it also vibes well with what we all were thinking anyway, and the unexpected seriousness of the title.
Other candidates:
- Serial (produces an incredibly exciting response which ends in a cliffhanger that withholds the answer)
- Prequel (instead of responding, it provides the full backstory leading up to your question)
- Yarn (maximizes output tokens by taking a long winding route to your answer)
- Head Canon (answers using its own entertainingly weird theories about the input)
- Overstory (your answer is interwoven with the answers from eight other users into a larger and deeply intertwined meta-answer)
- Oeuvre (for every question, it produces a diverse but cohesive body of work across a variety of mediums, each one a heartbreaking masterpiece in its own right)
Somehow, there's a LOTR joke to make about Lore consuming more Tolkiens.
> Overwhelmingly Large Narrative Unit
I miss Iain M Banks. Thanks for this lovely little nod to the Culture
https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-c...
One can only hope The Culture is the trajectory the future bends to.
No thank you
Also a reference to astronomer telescope naming: https://xkcd.com/1294/
This is great. "saga" and "canon" are most definitely a future model name candidates, although for lulz I'd like to see "Cinematic Universe"
Zack Snyder's Saga is also a good one
Is "release the Mythos" the new "Snyder cut" chant?
And also, chant is a lovely name that was skipped over. Especially for the models that won't stop sounding like a broken record.
Semantic inflation.
The Dario Legendarium is definitely going to be a fun piece of work for historians to interrogate as to the origin of this age. The relative personalities of the orgs involved show somewhat in their naming: {o1,4o,3.5,5.5} vs. {Haiku,Sonnet,Opus} vs. {3.1, 3.5-pro, 3.5-flash, 3.5-flash-lite} vs. {3.7, 3.7-plus, 3.7-max}
It's a pity that Samsung isn't in the mix. I would have liked to have used a model named Samsung Galaxy S10+ 5G Lite.
And Sony as well - AI-LLM1000XM5 Mark II.
To nitpick, the “M” in XM is “mark”, no?
Galaxy AI 3.8-Flash-Plus Max (xhigh)
Samsung Galaxy Brain S26
Anthropic intentionally degrading responses shows you they're also focusing on the wrong things. Rather than producing the best model possible, they're nerfing their models' capabilities.
Users are enemies. Customers are thieves
At the moment codex/gpt5.5 runs cycles around claude/opus. Fable is stupidly expansive, and Mythos is just a myth.
I don't find any reason to switch back to Anthropic, and they seem to be find with it...
People believing myths and fables are factual perhaps can expect to be a little bit disappointed.
Was thinking similarly.
"Fable" is not the name I would have chosen for a product that has to argue for the fact of its own economic viability but it is the correct mood. Perhaps Anthropic is trolling Zitron.
20 years from now we will get Claude Odyssey, and we'll have gone full circle.
I like how the original triplet's initials represent their behavior well:
- Opus is OP, like OverPowered
- Sonnet is SO, like your significant other (this was more meaningful in Sonnet 3.7 days)
- Haiku is HA, like the reaction to a bad joke
The latest model, naturally, needed three letters: FAB.
I'm now looking forward to ABS and LO
Lo! I show you the Overclaude!
Tractatus - highly aware of its limitations and refuses to speak about too many topics. Really likes numbering statements. Unusable due to a context window bug which is patched after considerable delay.
Funny how they keep naming their models after literary concepts after abandoning creative writing completely.
I do think Anthropic nailed their naming down much better than OpenAI
I miss the days when the dropdown menu (in their consumer product with a billion users) asked me if I wanted to use o3, 4o, 4o-mini, o4-mini, gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, or gpt-4.5 (Research Preview).
It would be hard to do worse than OpenAI in naming
Thankfully Microsoft doesn't let it's windows or xbox team do the naming of their latest ai model, otherwise MAI flash 360 series X will take the cake
Copilot Copilot.
I actually laughed out loud in a restaurant.
Terms of Service as the third largest gave a good chuckle.
Right after Chinematic Universe (Director's Cut)
- Prayer: Press enter and hope for the best.
- Parable: Responds to the question that you didn't know you needed to ask.
- Bible: Dozens of parable instances reporting in different epochs. Tokens are redeemed on expiry.
Fan Fiction: Open weight distillations / riffs
I like "Proverb" as smaller than Haiku too, Aphorism is also good. But seriously I want Anthropic to up its small model game. Haiku is not competitive, Deepseek v4 flash outperforms my uses for about $0.10 / $0.20. Whereas Haiku 4.5 is $1/$5.
IMO Anthropic should just play the game at all the price tiers because it otherwise forces people to go elsewhere. I would probably pay for a "Proverb"/"Aphorism" class model that was worse than Deepseek at the same price just to stay in the ecosystem, if given the option.
(Note: I also see Google seem to make the same mistake, they actually do have competitive models in Gemma family but they don't make them available via the API. So there may be some reason for this.)
What would you use Haiku for?
Models like Haiku are great if you just want to apply JSON structure to some free text.
"Comeback" or "quip" for a low-latency sub-Haiku model.
Don't forget the open weight model they could release: Free Verse.
Thank you for the laughter! (I laughed out loud)
This is a well executed joke, from the design to the shortness to the being on point to the abrupt punchlines when one looks at the lower ones and it also vibes well with what we all were thinking anyway, and the unexpected seriousness of the title.
Claude Obituary - when you’re ready to sever ties and move on
If you subscribe to the orthogonality and instrumental convergence theses, Obituary is a fitting model name for whenever AGI is achieved
Let's hope for Claude yAGnI.
'we have simon willison at home'
(great article!)
"the other sw"
I asked an AI bot to do this just this morning and it also suggested:
I like epic, essay, report, thesis, and slide deck.
Claude Palimpsest
Claude Epitaph
> Fable: Mythos, until the question matters
Vicious, but true. SWE at my company immediately tried "check my codebase for vulnerabilities" and was immediately downgraded to Opus.
Canto? Epic? Libretto? Axiom?
Libretto: a full story but then another model sets it to music
I saw a comment on HN that they (Sonnet and Haiku) were originally named from a nearby coffeeshop.
https://postscript.co/pages/shop-coffee-beans
The Chinese models are well written fan fic
Would have been nicer if they stayed in the literary sphere rather than films. But funny nonetheless lol.
Corpus seems to fit and add is missing from the list
Claude Common Crawl
Claude Word: a model that returns a single word.
Claude Littera: a model so good at summarizing that it summarizes everything to a letter.
(Unfortunately just like English a letter can also mean a correspondence.)
Well it's going to be a long letter anyway, because we don't have enough tokens to make it a short one. So probably a w, I guess?
They should have launched with Beowulf.
The last one will be "Killer Joke".
"The Aristocrats"
Don't forget the word "epic" (in terms of the literary definition).
id love it if their last model, like some sorta far-ASI, in context RSI monster, be called `claude fin`
Requiem
It's almost certainly a reference to Lovecraft actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos
Hopefully future models will be kind enough not to behave like malevolent gods.
The word mythos means roughly the same as "myth" and dates to 1753.
Why do you think that?
Allegory, Reference, Anthology, Edict, Appendix
> Fable (xhigh) - Bankruptcy speedrun
PREACH
Idk why I thought it was Simon Willianson blog, the names are kinda similar
Based on their actions, not their words, my reading is that they just don't have the compute capacity to rollout Mythos or Fable.
- Claude Potato
- Claude Skynet
- Claude HAL 9000
- Claude Auto
- Google Claude
- Claude Whatchamacallit
- Claude Cloud
- Claude Copilot
- Claude Vibe Code
Meanwhile Apple be like:
Siri AI !
They are doing their best.
- Magnum Opus
- Fairytale
- Pulp Fiction
Socrates?
That might be the theme. Or we could be looking at something like:
-- Mythos
-- Fable
-- Fantasy
-- Delusion
-- Pareidolia
-- Psychosis