Snowflake introduces Cortex AI Gateway, a central layer that enables companies to manage and secure both their own and third-party AI agents. The gateway addresses the challenges of securing agents and managing the costs associated with their AI usage.
The gateway provides orchestration, governance, and control of first-party agents built within Snowflake, as well as third-party agents from external platforms such as Claude Code and Cursor. Cortex AI Gateway builds on Snowflake’s acquisition of Natoma, announced in May 2026. This brings Natoma’s enterprise MCP capabilities directly into the platform. Natoma acts as a central MCP gateway that verifies who is requesting an action, what permissions are associated with it, and whether the action is permitted.
The gateway supports more than 100 MCP servers, thereby centralizing access policies, authentication, and permissions. It also maintains a complete overview of what each agent does, which systems are accessed, and the sequence of steps taken. Additionally, the gateway routes requests to approved models, taking quality, cost, latency, and availability into account.
Costs and external partners
A second key focus is cost control. Through the gateway, IT and finance teams gain a unified view of AI usage and can allocate costs to the teams, agents, or workloads that generate them. Spending limits can also be set to prevent unmanageable costs.
At the same time, Snowflake is announcing new integrations for secure access by external agents. These include 1Password, Aembit, Linx Security, Okta, SailPoint, and Saviynt. These integrations are designed to make third-party agents more manageable and restrict agent access to only what a task requires.
“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 at Snowflake. “The future of the agentic enterprise will not be built in closed agent ecosystems.”
Tip: Snowflake Cortex Code is now called CoCo and performs autonomous development work