> Now, Anthropic is jamming two version strings on the same product, and I consider that a bad choice. It doesn’t mean I think OpenAI’s approach is great either, but I think there are nuances that say they’re not doing exactly the same thing

Anthropic has always had dated versions as well as the other components, and they are, in fact, doing exactly the same thing, except that OpenAI has a base model in each generation with no suffix before the date specifier (what I call the "Model Class" on the table below), and OpenAI is inconsistent in their date formats, see:

  Major Family  Generation    Model Class Date
  claude        3.5           sonnet      20041022
  claude        3.0           opus        20240229
  gpt           4             o           2024-08-06
  gpt           4             o-mini      2024-07-18
  gpt           4             -           0613
  gpt           3.5           turbo       0125

But did they ever have more than one release of Claude 3 Sonnet? Or any other model prior to today?

As far as I can tell, the answer is “no”. If true, then the fact that they previously had date strings would be a purely academic footnote to what I was saying, not actually relevant or meaningful.