Cost-Governed RAG: Unified Per-Tenant Cost Attribution Across Retrieval and Generation in Multi-Tenant LLM Systems

Abstract

arXiv:2607.12188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) deployments face a critical governance gap: while LLM generation cost is metered per token, the retrieval layer - vector memory, similarity compute, and embedding API calls - remains an unattributed shared cost, enabling invisible cross-subsidization among tenants. We present Cost-Governed RAG, an architecture that integrates a codebook-oblivious vector index (TurboVec) with a multi-tenant LLM governa