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A Pinecone project belongs to an organization and contains indexes, assistants, and users. Only a user who belongs to the project can access the indexes and assistants in that project. Each project also has at least one project owner.

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Project environments

You choose a cloud environment for each index in a project. This lets you manage related resources across environments and access them with the same API key.

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Project roles

If you’re an organization owner or project owner, you can manage who has access to a project. To grant a principal (a user, service account, or API key) access, assign it one or more roles scoped to the project. A principal can hold more than one role, and its effective permissions are the union of all the roles it holds. The roles you assign depend on the principal type:
  • Users and service accounts are typically assigned a membership role (ProjectOwner, ProjectManager, or ProjectMember), optionally combined with one or more access roles.
  • API keys are typically assigned ProjectEditor or ProjectViewer, or one or more access roles. API keys can’t be assigned ProjectOwner, ProjectManager, or ProjectMember, which include access to project settings, members, and API keys. To access these items programmatically, use a service account.
The owner, manager, and member roles have these project settings, resource, and data permissions: For pod-based indexes, the roles have these additional permissions:
Pod-based indexes are legacy. Customers who signed up for a Standard or Enterprise plan on or after August 18, 2025 cannot create them. Create a serverless index instead. Serverless indexes use on-demand read capacity by default, or dedicated read nodes for sustained high query rates and workloads of millions of records or more.
Pod-based indexes don’t support role-based access control and always grant data plane read and write access to project members.

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Role permissions

These tables list the operations each general, control plane, and data plane role covers:

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General permissions

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Control plane permissions

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Data plane permissions

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API keys

Each Pinecone project has one or more API keys. To make calls to the Pinecone API, you must provide a valid API key for the relevant Pinecone project. For more information, see Manage API keys.

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Project IDs

Each Pinecone project has a unique project ID. To find the ID of a project, go to the project list in the Pinecone console.

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See also