Where AI Permissions Get Checked: Inside a Copy, or at the Source

One common approach to access control in retrieval-augmented generation is to replicate and filter: enforce document-level permissions inside the system that serves the answers. AWS frames that pattern as falling short.

Amazon Quick and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, the company says, instead enforce access control lists in real time, verifying permissions directly with authoritative sources at query time. The distinction is where the check lives — in a copy of the permission structure, or in the system that actually owns the document.