As enterprises grapple with governing growing fleets of AI agents, Snowflake has unveiled Cortex AI Gateway, a new runtime control plane designed to help organizations track agent actions, enforce policies, and manage AI spending across models and tools.
Built on technology , head of core data platform at Snowflake.
“Its role is to provide a trusted control plane that governs how AI agents securely access models, tools, MCP servers, enterprise systems, and data across increasingly diverse AI environments as enterprises adopt more models and agents for their applications and workflows,” Avanes added.
That control plane, according to analysts, could help enterprises address “a real gap” as they scale agentic deployments.
“Most enterprises cannot see or govern agent activity consistently across models, tools, MCP servers, and enterprise systems, as most AI gateways just route models and log prompts,” said , practice lead of AI stack at HyperFRAME Research.
The new offering, according to Leone, should also help CIOs reduce the burden of governance operations as agents scale.
The key is embedding AI agent governance, including related , advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group.
More so because model and agent providers have been shifting toward consumption-based pricing, making it harder for CIOs to understand who is using AI resources, how much they cost, and whether spending remains within policy, Bickley pointed out.
For developers, though, the new offering can cut both ways.
If implemented well, the Gateway should simplify development by simplifying tedious tasks and consolidating separate provider credentials, provisioning of logging frameworks, cost and usage instrumentation, and access control mechanisms with one application layer, Bickley said.
Otherwise, it could become a bottleneck with developers being forced to use multiple gateway products, resulting in development delays, Bickley added.
The offering is slated to enter public preview soon.
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