It seems that in the past, we supported any mappings that specify no discriminator values and hence allow all entities to be referred to. The any key would be the class name then. Also see old documentation about this: https://docs.atlassian.com/hibernate2/2.1.8/reference/mapping.html and a discourse discussion asking about this here: https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/annotation-equivalent-of-any-mapping-with-no-discriminators-configured/7638