Snowflake debuts Cortex AI Gateway to govern and monitor enterprise AI agents
Snowflake Inc. today introduced Cortex AI Gateway, a centralized control layer that lets enterprises connect, govern and monitor artificial intelligence agents as they reach into models, tools, Model Context Protocol servers and internal systems.
The company cast the gateway as the connective tissue for the “agentic enterprise,” the point at which autonomous software agents start acting across corporate data and applications rather than simply retrieving information. Traditional security architectures were not built for that level of cross-system activity, Snowflake argues, leaving organizations without a consistent way to see what their agents are doing or what those agents cost.
Cortex AI Gateway is designed to govern agents built inside Snowflake, including its own CoWork and CoCo agents, alongside third-party agents developed on outside platforms such as Claude Code and Cursor. It supports more than 100 MCP servers and centralizes the access policies, authentication and permissions that decide which models, data, applications and tools each agent can touch.
The product builds directly on Snowflake’s acquisition of Natoma Labs Inc., the MCP governance startup it agreed to buy in May. Natoma’s technology gives the gateway an enterprise-grade MCP platform for brokering secure connections between agents and the systems they act on.
