A quick Google search reveals terms such as "sparse attention" that are used to avoid quadratic runtime.
I don't know if Anthropic has revealed such details since AI research is getting more and more secretive, but the architectural tricks definitely exist.
Then you need to do a little bit deeper research. No one just applies sparse attention at inference time for a model not trained for it. They do this at training time because otherwise the task performance degrades too much.
I don't know if Anthropic has revealed such details since AI research is getting more and more secretive, but the architectural tricks definitely exist.