How do you reconcile a requirement for citations with a...

Both positions are satisfiable. By keeping the retrieval tool within the agentic loop and ensuring it returns source IDs, you satisfy the compliance requirement for citations. However, you must acknowledge the trade-off: moving to a uniform tool interface allows the model to decide when to retrieve, effectively creating a learned ‘when-to-retrieve’ policy. This introduces new failure modes that should be measured via citation coverage before and after the migration.