I won't argue with your point; both Anthropic and OpenAI name their models poorly, and it is hard to follow unless you're already following it.

"Sonnet" only makes sense relative to other things but not by itself. If you don't know those other things, it is difficult to understand.

But, if you were asking (and I'm not sure that you are): "Sonnet 4.6 is a cheaper, but worse, version of Opus 4.6 which itself is like GPT-5.3 Codex with Thinking High. Making Sonnet 4.6 like a ChatGPT 5.3 Thinking Standard model."

> But, if you were asking (and I'm not sure that you are)

I was wondering, so thank you!

I think they're assuming the reader already understands their Opus > Sonnet> Haiku. Which is probably not a great assumption.

I can see the argument if you’re familiar with poetry terms, then of course that naming makes sense, but I think proper names occupy a different part of the brain for people which inhibits the ability to make that connection. But also the jump from sonnet to opus is not as big as haiku to sonnet even though the names might imply such a jump (17 syllables -> 14 lines -> multi page masterpiece does not capture the difference between the models)

> I can see the argument if you’re familiar with poetry terms,

I think they mean "if you're familiar with Anthropic's family of models". They've had the same opus > sonnet > haiku line of models for a couple of years now. It's assumed that people already know where sonnet 4.6 lands in the scheme of things. Because they've had that in 4.5, and 4.1 before it, and 4 before it, and 3.7 before it, etc.

Yeah their naming is bad. I've always knew it because of how long the types of poems are but most people don't know poems.

Perhaps AI wrote the announcement.