With Anthropic you always have 3 models to choose from: Opus-latest, Sonnet-latest, and Haiku-latest, from the best/slowest to the worst/fastest.

The version numbers are mostly irrelevant as afaik price per token doesn't change between versions.

Three random names isn't ideal. I'm often need to double check which is which. This is why we use numbers

They aren't random. Opus's are very long poems, haikus are very short ones (3 lines), sonnets are in between (~14 lines)

How are the names random?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

They dropped the magnum from opus but you could still easily deduce the order of the models just from their names if you know the words.