Introducing Contextual Retrieval
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Summary
Building production RAG systems at scale required custom query generation, chunking strategies, chunk reranking, and injecting metadata to improve results.
Off-the-shelf pipelines produced poor results on large datasets, making iterative system rewrites necessary. Key stack components included vector databases (Azure, Pinecone, Turbopuffer), custom chunking, advanced rerankers, and selective query routing for unsupported questions.