Somewhat related, I find claude is very reluctant to talk about newer Qwen models. Most likely it’s just training cutoff, but even with web search it’ll insist that Qwen3 is the newest. “oh qwen 3.8 must be a typo, the user clearly meant qwen3”, stuff like that. Maybe it’s some vain attempt to stop people from switching to open models? Or to catch the alleged qwen distilling?

It's just training cutoff. Fable 5 would refuse to acknowledge the existence of Opus 5 and would insist on using 4.8.