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

Jul 15, 2026

A new architecture, Cost-Governed RAG, integrates a codebook-oblivious vector index (TurboVec) with a multi-tenant LLM governance gateway to enable unified, per-tenant cost attribution for both retrieval and generation in enterprise RAG systems. In experiments simulating 100 tenants and 10 million vectors, the system achieved 99.96% cost attribution accuracy with less than 0.04% telemetry overhead. The approach also reduced retrieval infrastructure costs by 3.1-9.0x compared to managed vector database services, under specified pricing assumptions.

Why it matters: This work provides a significant advance in enterprise RAG governance by enabling transparent, accurate per-tenant cost accounting for both retrieval and generation, supporting fair billing and resource allocation in multi-tenant LLM deployments.

Full story at: arXiv AI/ML ↗