Open Data Infrastructure
AI-Ready Context Authorization Receipts
How context retrieval should emit authorization receipts showing identity, policy checks, source authority, allowed fields, and denied paths.
If an AI system retrieves context and nobody can explain why that context was allowed, the access control model is theater.
Context needs authorization receipts
AI-ready context is not just chunks, embeddings, and prompts. It is governed information. Every retrieved item should carry enough evidence to show that the requesting identity was allowed to receive it.
An authorization receipt is a compact record of that decision. It should not expose sensitive policy internals to every user, but it should preserve the facts needed for audit, incident review, and answer explanation.
The receipt needs specific fields
A practical receipt includes request identity, tool or application identity, source identifier, allowed fields, denied fields, policy version, decision time, source authority, freshness state, and lineage reference. OPA can handle policy decisions. DataHub-style URNs can identify assets. W3C PROV and OpenLineage offer models for provenance and data movement.
The receipt should be attached before context reaches the model. If the only record exists after the answer is generated, the team has already lost the control point.
Core idea: authorization receipts turn context retrieval from a hidden app behavior into reviewable infrastructure.
Receipts belong in the context path
For related ODI patterns, read AI-ready context provenance receipts, AI-ready data entitlement graphs, and context graphs for retrieval governance.
The receipt should travel with the answer metadata. A downstream reviewer should be able to see that the system retrieved a source because policy allowed it, not because the vector index happened to find it.
What breaks first
- The app checks permissions but stores only a success flag.
- Denied sources disappear from the record, so policy gaps remain invisible.
- Field-level permissions are flattened into table-level access.
- The receipt identifies the document but not the source system of record.
Receipt questions
Ask whether every retrieved context item can answer who asked, what policy ran, what was allowed, what was denied, and which source authority applied. If not, the context layer is not ready for agents.
Sources to start with
These primary and authoritative sources anchor the claims in this guide.
- Open Policy Agent documentation
- Model Context Protocol tools specification
- DataHub concepts documentation
- W3C PROV-O recommendation
The answer can be useful only if the context path was allowed in the first place.