Mechanisms are provided for implementing a cognitive access control. The mechanisms receive an access request from a requestor for accessing a resource and generate a context for the resource based on one or more first corpora of information regarding the resource. The mechanisms further generate a requestor profile for the requestor based on one or more second corpora of information regarding the requestor, other users, and relationships between the requestor and the other users. In addition, the mechanisms compare elements of the context for the resource with elements of the requestor profile, generate a decision as to whether to grant or deny the access request based on results of the comparison, and control access to the resource based on the decision.