# Only approved files can answer. Every answer names its source.

Answers from your own files. Ask a model about your policies and it answers from memory; Tileward Documents answers from the files you approved, and the passages it was given come back with the answer. This page covers how grounding works and how your documents are kept separate in each deployment.

Page: https://tileward.com/documents/

## What it does

- **Approved files only:** retrieval stays inside the set you approved.
- **Sources attached:** the passages it was given come back with the answer.
- **Private to your account:** never used for training.
- **Locks checked first:** [Tileward Governance](https://tileward.com/governance/) refuses a locked tile before the request reaches the model.

## How it works

Documents is the approved knowledge layer: it grounds the answer before the model writes it.

1. **Add approved files.** Policies, manuals, SOPs, contracts and internal guidance stay in the account or deployment you choose.
2. **Retrieve the passage.** For each question, Tileward selects the passage that can answer instead of sending the whole library.
3. **Return the passages.** The answer comes back with the passages it was given, so a person can check it against the document in force.

It connects through the client you already run: 28 clients have a recipe to paste in the [connect guide](https://tileward.com/docs/#connect), and anything else that speaks MCP or the OpenAI wire format works too.

## Isolation

- **Hosted:** a managed service with account-level separation.
- **Your VPC:** documents, retrieval and inference remain inside your cloud boundary.
- **Air-gapped:** no document, question, answer or index reaches Tileward.

## Try it

- [Open Documents](https://app.tileward.com/documents) in the console.
- Bring one document and one question, and an engineer will show you the retrieved passage and the answer it comes back with: [talk to an engineer](https://calendar.app.google/hg2DzFTxKJgwFWm19).

## Related

- [Tileward Governance](https://tileward.com/governance/): refuse locked tiles before inference
- [Tileward Context](https://tileward.com/context/): send only the conversation that matters
- [Security](https://tileward.com/security/): compare deployment boundaries
- [Platform overview](https://tileward.com/platform/): how the pieces work together
- [Developer docs](https://tileward.com/docs/): connect a client or call the API