# Memory

> Give Agents durable knowledge with explicit ownership, retention, and retrieval boundaries.

A Memory is an Agent-facing Resource for durable knowledge. An Agent can remember a record, search relevant records, retrieve one record, delete one record, or purge everything it owns in that Memory. The Memory defines who owns each partition, how long records remain, and how retrieval behaves. Agent input never selects an arbitrary partition.

## Memory and Memory Stores {#memory-and-memory-stores}

The Console separates the logical capability from its persistence backend:

| Object | Responsibility |
| --- | --- |
| Memory | Stable Agent binding, owner scope, retention, retrieval defaults, and access Policy |
| Memory Store | Persistence, indexing, retrieval implementation, Credentials, and provider-specific configuration |

Constal Memory is a platform-provided Store available to every tenant. A tenant may also configure another Store that implements the same Memory Store capability. Changing the Store implementation does not change the operations the Agent uses.

## Choose an owner scope {#choose-an-owner-scope}

| Scope | Partition is derived from | Typical use |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Session | Accepted durable session | Conversation context that must not cross sessions |
| Principal | Authenticated principal | Personal preferences and individual history |
| Customer | Authenticated downstream customer | Shared context for one customer organization |
| Tenant | Authenticated tenant | Knowledge shared across authorized tenant Agents |

Customer scope fails closed when the accepted request has no authenticated customer. Principal and customer identities come from Channel authentication and accepted authority, not from text supplied to the Agent.

## Continue {#continue}

Use [Configure Memory](/docs/memory/configure.md) to create one, then [Use Memory from an Agent](/docs/memory/use.md) to bind and invoke it. Review [Scoped bindings](/docs/credentials/scoped-bindings) when the Store itself must vary by tenant, customer, or principal.