Snowflake Launches Cortex AI Gateway to Secure Enterprise AI Agents
Snowflake has introduced Cortex AI Gateway, a new platform designed to help organisations securely manage, govern and monitor AI agents across enterprise environments while providing centralised visibility into AI usage and consumption costs.
The launch is accompanied by a series of AI security enhancements aimed at establishing a trusted foundation for enterprise AI interoperability. As organisations increasingly deploy AI agents across data, applications and business workflows, Snowflake said enterprises require stronger governance, security and cost controls to manage growing AI ecosystems.
Cortex AI Gateway enables organisations to manage both Snowflake-built AI agents, including Snowflake CoWork and Snowflake CoCo, as well as third-party AI agents developed on external platforms such as Claude Code and Cursor. The platform provides a unified control layer to govern how AI agents access enterprise data, models, applications, tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers while helping organisations monitor AI activity and optimise infrastructure costs.
The announcement builds on Snowflake’s acquisition of Natoma in May 2026, bringing enterprise MCP platform capabilities into Snowflake to support secure agent interoperability. The company also unveiled new integrations with 1Password, Aembit, Linx Security, Okta, SailPoint and Saviynt to strengthen governance and auditing of third-party AI agents across enterprise environments.
“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.”
According to Snowflake, Cortex AI Gateway allows enterprises to centrally manage agent access policies, authentication and permissions across more than 100 MCP servers. It also provides detailed visibility into agent activity, including the systems and tools accessed, while offering IT and finance teams insight into AI consumption by teams, workloads and applications to help prevent uncontrolled spending. The platform can also intelligently route requests across enterprise-approved AI models to optimise quality, latency, cost and availability.
The new security integrations are designed to give enterprises greater control over third-party AI agents by providing clearer visibility into agent identities, enforcing task-specific permissions and extending governance policies across multiple AI platforms.
Snowflake also announced additional AI security capabilities that enhance enterprise risk management, agent identity verification, sensitive data protection, context-aware security controls and task-scoped agent sessions, extending its zero-trust security approach to AI deployments.
