AI engineering glossary · RAG vector search
What is access control in retrieval?
Access control in retrieval: Enforcing who may see which documents at search time, so restricted content is never retrieved for unauthorised users. Permissions are typically stored as metadata and applied as filters before results reach the model.
Access control in retrieval: an example
An intern's query cannot retrieve chunks tagged 'confidential: finance', because the filter uses the intern's role.
Related terms
More RAG vector search terms
- Agentic RAG
- Alpha weighting
- ANN recall
- Answer correctness
- Answer relevance
- Approximate nearest neighbour search
- Asymmetric search
- Attribution
Where you learn it
Access control in retrieval is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.