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Snowflake and Anthropic unveiled a major partnership today to embed AI agents directly into corporate data environments, empowering businesses to analyze vast amounts of information while maintaining strict security controls.
The companies will integrate Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model into Snowflake’s new Cortex Agents platform, allowing organizations to deploy AI systems that can analyze both structured database information and unstructured content like documents within their existing security frameworks.
“We believe that AI agents will soon be essential to the enterprise workforce,” said Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, during a media roundtable. “They’ll enhance the productivity for many teams such as customer support analytics, engineering, and they’ll free up employee time to focus on higher value things.”
Snowflake strengthens AI capabilities with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5
The partnership addresses a crucial challenge in enterprise AI adoption — deploying powerful AI models securely at scale. Claude will run entirely within Snowflake’s security boundary, eliminating concerns about sending sensitive data to external AI services.
“Running Claude within Snowflake’s security perimeter allows customers to build and deploy AI applications while keeping their data governed,” said Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, during the press conference.
Early results show promise. Snowflake reports 90% accuracy on complex text-to-SQL tasks in internal benchmarks, significantly outperforming previous approaches. Siemens Energy has already built an AI chatbot analyzing over half a million pages of internal documents, while Nissan North America achieved 97% accuracy in analyzing customer sentiment about dealer experiences.
How Snowflake is using AI to automate business data analysis
Cortex Agents, the platform at the heart of the announcement, orchestrates complex data tasks across both structured databases and unstructured content. The system combines two key components: Cortex Analyst, which converts natural language into accurate database queries, and Cortex Search, a hybrid search system that Snowflake claims outperforms competitors by at least 11% on standard benchmarks.
“Having such a state of the art model available to Snowflake customers contributes to the ease of use experience,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake. “Instead of which model to use, and how many prompts I need to go push to get something to behave the way I want it, or answer the question I need… it is phenomenal.”
Snowflake’s Cortex Agents promise smarter, faster enterprise AI
The partnership signals a shift in enterprise AI strategy. Companies now seek to integrate AI directly into existing data infrastructure rather than treating it as separate technology.
“Nobody is looking for just a token vendor that exchanges input tokens for output tokens,” Krieger explained. “They’re looking for somebody who will help them craft their AI strategy do so in a way that’s aligned with their values, and also that they trust to remain on the frontier.”
The platform includes comprehensive monitoring capabilities and maintains existing access controls and compliance requirements — crucial features as AI regulation evolves.
“Some amount of regulatory clarity would be helpful,” noted Kleinerman during the announcement. “But I think it’s on all of us, especially research labs that understand in next level detail that we’re involved to help inform how that regulation is formed.”
Why Snowflake’s AI strategy focuses on security and governance
The partnership offers technical decision makers a potential path to deploy AI at scale while maintaining security and governance. Success will likely depend on careful implementation and clear use cases that deliver measurable business value.
For enterprises grappling with growing data volumes and complexity, the ability to deploy AI safely and effectively could become a crucial competitive advantage. The platform’s combination of advanced AI capabilities with robust security controls suggests a future where intelligent agents become an integral part of corporate operations.
