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You are selecting a pattern for a compliance Q&A assistant that must answer policy questions with citations to the authoritative internal source set. Latency, cost, and audit predictability are prioritized.
Which pattern is the best fit?
A constrained retrieval-augmented generation architecture best satisfies the grounding, citation, latency, cost, and audit requirements. The system first indexes the approved internal policy corpus. At request time, it retrieves a small set of relevant passages, supplies those passages to Claude with stable source identifiers, and requires the answer to cite the supporting material. Anthropic's search-result content blocks are specifically designed for this pattern: they allow custom RAG systems to provide source-attributed internal content and enable Claude to render citations against those results.
The retrieval boundary is critical. Only approved and version-controlled policy sources should be searchable, with document identifiers, effective dates, access controls, retrieval scores, and cited passages retained for audit reconstruction. This produces substantially more predictable evidence than unconstrained web research.
A planner-researcher-writer system introduces unnecessary model calls, orchestration complexity, cost, latency, and behavioral variance for routine policy lookup. Open-web browsing violates the authoritative-source requirement and increases prompt-injection and provenance risk. Concatenating the complete corpus into every prompt wastes tokens, increases latency, and can reduce retrieval precision as the corpus expands.
Study Guide references/topics: Search-result blocks for cited RAG; Claude citations; authoritative-corpus retrieval; source attribution; auditable context engineering.
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