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Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today introduced <a href="http://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/enterprise-ai-security-agentic-mcp-governance”>Cortex AI Gateway2 and several AI security innovations that establish the foundation for trusted agent interoperability, enabling organizations to securely scale their agentic enterprises. Cortex AI Gateway addresses two of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption today by helping organizations secure AI agents, while providing centralized visibility and control over AI consumption costs.
As AI agents increasingly collaborate across enterprise data, apps, and platforms, they introduce unprecedented security and governance risks, while driving growing AI consumption across models and workloads. Traditional security architectures were not designed for this level of cross-system agent activity, and organizations often lack a centralized way to govern AI usage. This requires a new security and cost model where trust enables interoperability across every AI interaction. Today, Snowflake is solidifying the foundation for a secure agent ecosystem where agents can interoperate across the enterprise with the trust, visibility, control, and cost oversight businesses need.
Snowflake is unveiling Cortex AI Gateway, a major advancement that enables enterprises to securely control, orchestrate, and govern both first-party AI agents built within Snowflake, such as Snowflake CoWork and Snowflake CoCo, and third-party AI agents developed on external platforms such as Claude Code and Cursor. Cortex AI Gateway gives enterprises a unified foundation to govern how agents access models, tools, MCP servers, and enterprise systems; intelligently route agent requests; and optimize AI consumption across models and workloads. As a result, teams gain greater visibility and control across AI access, agent activity, and token usage to help prevent runaway AI costs.
Cortex AI Gateway builds on Snowflake’s acquisition of Natoma (May 2026), bringing Natoma’s enterprise MCP platform capabilities directly into the Snowflake platform for secure, enterprise-grade agent interoperability. Snowflake also announced new secure third-party agent access integrations4 with Aembit, 1Password, Linx Security, Okta, SailPoint, and Saviynt, setting a new standard for how enterprises govern and audit AI agents across the security ecosystem.
“Enterprise AI is moving from data interoperability to agent interoperability, and security has to be at the center of that shift,” said Mayank Upadhyay, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Snowflake. “Agent interoperability only works when enterprises can trust how agents from different platforms access data, invoke tools, and take action on behalf of users. Snowflake provides the visibility, governance, and control capabilities needed to make that interoperability secure for production AI. The future of the agentic enterprise will not be built in closed agent ecosystems, and Snowflake is the trusted control plane that enables secure enterprise work.”
Powering the Centralized AI Gateway for the Agentic Enterprise
For AI agents to deliver real business value, they need secure access to the models, data, applications, and tools that provide the full context of the enterprise. Today, those resources are fragmented across systems and providers, forcing teams to build and maintain custom connections while managing access, activity, and costs through disconnected controls.
Cortex AI Gateway advances Snowflake’s role as a secure AI interoperability layer for the agentic enterprise by establishing the gateway that helps enterprises centrally govern how AI agents access and use models, data, applications, and tools. For organizations like Meltwater, Cortex AI Gateway offers a path to make agents more useful, observable, and production-ready.
“At Meltwater, we help organizations make sense of fast-moving external data and turn insights into action. As AI becomes more embedded in that work, security and trust are critical to delivering value,” said Chief Technology Officer, Aditya Jami, Meltwater. “We see Cortex AI Gateway as a step towards ensuring our agents can securely connect to the right data and tools, helping us deliver trusted AI-powered insights faster while maintaining the security and control our customers expect.”
Cortex AI Gateway enables enterprises to:
- Govern Every Agent Connection: Enterprises need a consistent way to control which models, data, applications, MCP servers, and tools each agent can access. With support for more than 100 MCP servers, Cortex AI Gateway centralizes agent access policies, authentication, permissions, and controls.
- See and Understand Every Agent Action: As agents take action across enterprise systems, organizations need visibility into what each agent did, which systems and tools it accessed, and the sequence of steps it took. Cortex AI Gateway provides a centralized, end-to-end record of agent activity, giving teams the visibility needed to operate agents safely at scale.
- Keep AI Consumption Costs Under Control: Fragmented AI usage across models, teams, and workloads makes AI consumption costs difficult to track and control. Cortex AI Gateway gives IT and finance teams a unified view of AI consumption, attributes costs to the teams, agents, or workloads driving them, and enforces spending limits to help prevent runaway costs before they occur.
- Optimize Model Selection and Performance: Enterprises need the flexibility to use multiple models while ensuring each request is routed to the right model for the task. Cortex AI Gateway intelligently routes requests to enterprise-approved models, optimizing quality, cost, latency, and availability while maintaining centralized governance.
Advancing Secure Third-Party Agent Access with Ecosystem Partners
For AI agents to deliver meaningful business value, they need to work securely across platforms. Yet many vendors still default to closed ecosystems, making it difficult for third-party agents to operate across organizational boundaries. Security is the key to unlocking that interoperability by establishing the trust, identity, and access controls agents need to work safely across platforms.
Snowflake is laying the foundation for secure third-party agent access across the security ecosystem, with the first wave of integrations from leading security vendors including 1Password, Aembit, Linx Security, Okta, SailPoint, and Saviynt.
To enable enterprises to deploy third-party agents with consistent security and control, these integrations are designed to:
- Make Third-Party Agents Governable: Enterprises can now move beyond the blind spot of agents acting under broad user credentials. With the new integrations, security teams have a clearer view into which agent accessed what data, through which platform, and under whose authority.
- Enable Task-Scoped Agent Access: Third-party agents should not inherit every permission a user has just because they are acting on the user’s behalf. Snowflake’s approach limits agent access to only what the task requires, creating a safer model for using agents across an enterprise’s data ecosystem.
- Extend Consistent Governance Across Agent Ecosystems: These integrations represent an important milestone for the security industry by helping unlock a pathway toward secure cross-platform agent interoperability.
Expanding AI Security for the Agentic Era
Snowflake is advancing enterprise security foundations across the areas that matter most for production-ready AI. This includes new advancements that enable security teams to better understand their AI risk posture1, provide agents with a verified identity1, protect sensitive data from improper use1, apply more context-aware controls3, and limit agent sessions to the scope required for the task3. By bringing zero-trust security to the agentic enterprise, Snowflake is helping enterprises like BlackRock and Thomson Reuters strengthen security, visibility, and control as they scale AI.
“At Thomson Reuters, building trusted AI for professionals requires strong security, governance, and visibility into how AI systems access data, use tools, and take action,” said Caitlin Halferty, Head of Data & Analytics, Thomson Reuters. “As AI becomes more deeply embedded in professional workflows, organizations need the ability to protect sensitive information and maintain clear controls without limiting innovation. Snowflake’s continued investment in AI security and governance supports the kind of trusted foundation enterprises need as they move agentic AI into production.”
Ecosystem Comments on the News
“AI agents are moving from assisting people to acting on their behalf across critical enterprise systems. The hard problem is no longer whether an agent can do useful work; it’s knowing which agent is acting, who authorized it, and what it is allowed to access,” said Nancy Wang, Chief Technology Officer, 1Password. “Our work with Snowflake is designed to give third-party agents short-lived, task-scoped access with clear human-to-agent attribution, so enterprises can move agents into production without giving them standing access to sensitive data.”
“AI agents are becoming active participants in enterprise systems, but securing them requires a fundamentally different approach than managing human access,” said David Goldschlag, CEO and Co-Founder, Aembit. “Through our work with Snowflake, we’re helping enterprises give third-party agents trusted, policy-based access to the resources they need, without relying on long-lived credentials, so they can reduce risk while enabling agents to operate securely at machine speed.”
“AI agents are introducing an entirely new class of identities into the enterprise that operate continuously, move across systems, and act on behalf of users,” said Niv Goldenberg, CPO and Co-Founder, Linx Security. “Together with Snowflake, Linx is helping organizations build a more complete picture of those agent identities and the access patterns around them, so security teams can identify risk earlier and govern agent activity without slowing innovation.”
“One of the biggest gaps in building a secure agentic enterprise is not knowing what your agents can connect to or what they’re allowed to do with that access,” said Ely Kahn, Chief Product Officer, Okta. “Through our work with Snowflake and our broader effort to advance Cross App Access as an open protocol for secure AI agent connections, our joint customers can bring third-party AI agents within the identity perimeter. Together, we’re helping ensure agents can operate within centralized identity policy, where every action is logged, and access is tightly scoped, before unlocking valuable enterprise data in Snowflake.”
“Agentic AI creates a major opportunity for productivity, but enterprises need trust, visibility, governance, and protection before they can capture that value at scale,” said Chandra Gnanasambandam, EVP of Product and Chief Technology Officer, SailPoint. “Through our integration with Snowflake, SailPoint helps organizations govern third-party agent access, giving them the visibility, accountability, and control needed to move agents into production with confidence.”
“Traditional identity security models were built for human users, not AI agents, creating a critical gap in enterprise security,” said Akhil Kapoor, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Saviynt. “Our integration with Snowflake addresses this challenge through Saviynt’s Access Gateway, which evaluates agent intent, context, permissions, and risk at runtime to ensure AI agents are only authorized to perform the actions required for a specific task. It prevents privilege misuse and anomalous activity before it can impact the business.”
Learn More:
- See how Snowflake’s AI security innovations are securing and governing AI at scale in this blog post.
- Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and X.
1 Snowflake product is now generally available.
2 Snowflake product will be public preview soon.
3 Snowflake product is now in private preview
4 1Password, Aembit, Linx Security, SailPoint, and Saviynt integrations will be private preview soon; Okta integration is currently planned for private preview in Q4 2026.