Snowflake launches Cortex AI Gateway to control AI agents

Snowflake announced Cortex AI Gateway on Tuesday, a centralized control layer designed to govern how AI agents, including those built by competitors, access enterprise data, tools, and models. The company also unveiled initial security integrations with several identity management vendors.

The announcement represents Snowflake's most aggressive move yet to position itself not just as the place where enterprise data resides, but as the control plane that dictates what AI agents are permitted to do with it.

"The next era of AI won’t be built through more walled gardens. It will be built through secure agent interoperability," said Mayank Upadhyay, Snowflake’s Chief Security and Trust Officer. "If every vendor builds a closed ecosystem of agents, enterprises simply recreate the fragmentation they’ve spent years trying to solve."

The gateway aims to manage agent access to data and control runaway AI costs by providing a unified view of AI consumption and enforcing spending limits.