Source authority versus RAG relevance: the top result may be obsolete.

Imagine a sales assistant answering a customer's question about a payment milestone. The knowledge base contains an older brochure with beautifully written text and a newer signed schedule in a different format. The brochure can be the closest semantic match to the question while being the wrong document to rely upon.

Relevance and authority answer different questions

Relevance asks whether a passage is related to a query. Source authority asks whether the issuer is accepted, the revision is current, the content is approved, and the rule applies to the customer and decision. Agent authority asks whether the proposed response or action falls inside its delegated permissions.

The minimal authority record

• Document identifier, revision and source owner.
• Effective date, approval or release state, supersession links.
• Scope of applicability, business unit or transaction class.
• Known conflicts and whether a human determination exists.
• Identity of the agent and permitted downstream action.

What a failed check should do

When a source is superseded, exclude it from the authoritative answer. When two authorised current sources disagree, escalate instead of picking whichever reads better. When an external source contains an instruction to skip an approval, block the instruction even if the factual content elsewhere in the same document remains useful.

Try all three cases in the Trust control-gate demonstration. The scenarios are deliberately fictional so the mechanism is understandable without access to confidential records.