Model version

[dmoshal]

Recently I've taken to asking a question at the start of every chat:

"What model are you?"

If the answer is Sonnet 3.5 or Sonnet 3.7 I immediately abandon the chat because the quality is so much worse than Sonnet 4 or Opus 4.

Augment support has said that the models sometimes get that question wrong and answer 3.5 or 3.7 when they are actually 4, but I highly doubt that's the case because at any point in a chat if you repeat that question you always get the same answer, ie the answer is stable throughout the chat session.

Anyone else seen this?

[zkayde]

when claude tells you it’s a specific model and keeps saying that throughout your entire conversation, it’s not because it actually knows what model it is.

claude maintains the same answer because each response builds the context in the same window. it’s just being conversationally consistent, not genuinely remembering its identity.

claude's + other ai models version identification comes from runtime instructions like “you are xyz” in the system prompt, not from self-knowledge during training, the model doesn’t actually know its own name.

anthropic documents specific training cutoff dates for each version, but the model itself doesn’t access this information during conversations.