Snowflake announced Cortex AI Gateway on Tuesday, a centralized control layer designed to govern how AI agents — including those built by competitors like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor — access enterprise data, tools, and models. Alongside the gateway, the company unveiled a first wave of security integrations with 1Password, Aembit, Linx Security, SailPoint, and Saviynt, an unusual coalition of identity vendors who often compete with one another, now aligned around a shared trust model for autonomous agents.

The announcement, made from the company’s no-headquarters base in Bozeman, Montana, is Snowflake’s most aggressive move yet to position itself not merely as the place where enterprise data lives, but as the control plane that decides what AI agents are allowed 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,” Mayank Upadhyay, Snowflake’s chief security and trust officer, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “If every vendor builds a closed ecosystem of agents, enterprises simply recreate the fragmentation they’ve spent years trying to solve. Instead of breaking down silos, they create a new generation of AI silos that limit innovation and make it harder to scale AI across the business.”

Why decades-old enterprise security models break when AI agents become the actors

The core argument animating today’s announcement is that decades of enterprise security architecture rests on an assumption that no longer holds — that the actor behind every access request is a person.

“Traditional security was built for a world where humans were the actors. AI agents change that completely. For decades, security models assumed people would access one application at a time, operating at human speed and within relatively defined boundaries,” Upadhyay said. The deeper issue, he argued, is not novelty but exposure: “The challenge isn’t that AI creates entirely new security problems. It’s that AI exposes the blind spots we’ve always had.”

Organizations have never had perfect visibility into every API, dataset, and workflow, Upadhyay noted, and at human speed those gaps were manageable. Agents operating at machine speed can “combine access across systems and act on permissions that were never intended to be exercised together, amplifying those longstanding risks.” His conclusion: “In the agentic era, trust can’t be a one-time decision made at login. It has to be continuously verified through every agent, every action, and every interaction across the enterprise.”

Nancy Wang, chief technology officer of 1Password, described the failure mode in more visceral terms. When agents first arrived, she told VentureBeat, the default pattern was dangerously simple: “Let me just give the agent my credentials and it can just act as me… let’s imagine you’re the head of security or the head of IT, and you have access, especially admin access, to all of the systems. Well, now suddenly your agent now has admin access to all of the systems, and so it could exfil data… if it’s subject to a prompt injection, for example.”

The audit trail becomes equally useless, she added: “Imagine the audit logs show that Michael sent a couple million dollars to an offshore account… It raises eyebrows when, in fact, it could just be an agent going off the rails and doing things that you never authorized.” Her prescription, and the premise of 1Password’s integration with Snowflake, is blunt: “Agents need their own identity.”

Inside Cortex AI Gateway: how Snowflake plans to govern agent access and rein in runaway AI costs

Cortex AI Gateway, which will enter public preview soon, functions as a connective layer for what Snowflake calls “all trusted agent activity.” It governs both first-party agents built inside Snowflake, such as Snowflake CoWork and CoCo, and third-party agents built on external platforms. With support for more than 100 MCP servers — the Model Context Protocol connectors that have become the de facto standard for wiring agents to enterprise tools — the gateway centralizes access policies, authentication, permissions, and audit logging in a single place.

The gateway also addresses a less glamorous but increasingly urgent problem: runaway AI spending. It gives IT and finance teams a unified view of AI consumption, attributes costs to the specific teams, agents, or workloads driving them, and enforces spending limits before bills spiral.

Upadhyay described how those costs compound in practice. “AI is dynamic. Agents can invoke multiple models, call different tools, and execute multi-step workflows, creating consumption patterns that can change from one task to the next. For example, an enterprise may deploy an AI assistant to help employees answer internal questions. A simple request that only requires retrieving a document could unintentionally be routed through a more expensive reasoning model, trigger additional searches across multiple systems, or invoke unnecessary workflows.” At scale, with thousands of employees and hundreds of agents, small inefficiencies become significant line items.

The gateway builds directly on Snowflake’s May 2026 acquisition of Natoma, a 27-person startup whose centralized MCP gateway enforced identity, policy, and audit at the tool-call level. Forbes reported at the time that the deal — announced the same day as Snowflake’s $1.33 billion quarterly product revenue report and a $6 billion AWS compute commitment — was the smallest of the day’s three announcements by dollar value but the most revealing about where Snowflake believes the next platform fight sits: not in the data warehouse, but in the layer that decides what an agent may touch and records what it did.

Dual attribution and task-scoped access: the technical blueprint for trusting autonomous agents

The technical centerpiece of the partner integrations is what Snowflake calls dual attribution. “By logging both the verified non-human identity of the agent and the specific human who authorized the task, we ensure task-scoped access and complete auditability for every action taken across the enterprise,” Upadhyay said. That answers a question that has stumped security teams: when an agent takes an action, whose action is it? The Snowflake model says the answer is both — the agent’s, and the human’s who delegated the task — and both must be recorded.

Task-scoped access is the companion principle. Rather than inheriting a user’s full standing permissions, an agent gets access only to what a specific task requires. Upadhyay acknowledged the obvious objection — agents are dynamic and their next step often isn’t known in advance. “The goal isn’t to predict every action an agent will take. It’s to ensure that every action an agent takes is evaluated in real time against the appropriate policies, scope, contextual signals, and the original intent of the user,” he said.

Wang explained how 1Password’s piece works at the protocol level, pointing to emerging standards like OIDC-A: “the human, for example, first authorizes the agent to do a specific task, and then what that means is the agent will then receive sort of the delegated task specific token… as part of that token, that is where you learn of the original sort of delegator identity and also the intent behind the task.”

The intent-preservation problem is subtle, she noted, because enterprise tasks decompose into enormous chains of individual operations. “When they’re accessing a table, you know that it’s acting on behalf of the original intent that you gave that agent… a task might be a compilation of hundreds, maybe even thousands, individual actions.” Keeping that intent intact across every step in the chain — and flagging the moment an agent deviates from it — is what the coalition is ultimately trying to standardize.

SailPoint’s field report: the three ways enterprise identity systems fail against AI agents

Chandra Gnanasambandam, SailPoint’s EVP of product and chief technology officer, brought the perspective of a vendor that has watched enterprises break their identity stacks against this problem for more than a year. SailPoint has been in the machine and agent security market for roughly 18 months, he said, with more than 100 customers on its agent identity product — enough of a sample to catalog the recurring failures.

The first is scale-driven shallowness. An average Fortune 500 company has roughly 16,000 employees, and SailPoint is seeing human-to-non-human identity ratios of at least 10 to 1 — before counting the tools and APIs each agent touches, which multiply the count again. “You will get into a million plus non-human identities. Mapping the permissions that each of them get to the 16,000 humans is a completely non-trivial task,” he said. Most companies punt, mapping agents to humans at the directory-group level. “That is grossly insufficient. You want to have fine grain context. Like I said, it’s not access to Snowflake. It’s access to what column and what data inside Snowflake you need.”

The second failure mode is drift. Modern models are relentless goal-seekers, and that persistence cuts both ways. “When you tell them get this done, the underlying models are so powerful now. Even the weaker models are so powerful. They will go find a way to get it done… They will go find the vulnerabilities to bypass the permission to get it done,” Gnanasambandam warned. The answer, he argued, is runtime monitoring of the entire interaction chain, compared continuously against policy, with automatic intervention when an agent escalates beyond what its human delegator authorized.

The third is missing data context. Many vendors, he argued, announce splashy integrations with big application platforms while ignoring where the actual risk concentrates. “That’s not where the risk lies. Risk lies in sensitive data, so the details matter here… Can you map specific columns and rows in Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, Oracle… into the agent context and the human context? And if you can’t do that, you are going to have gaps and holes.”

SailPoint’s answer required tearing out two decades of architecture. “We rewrote our underlying data and object model to treat AI identity as a first-class object, because for 20 years, SailPoint had a data model and object model that supported the human identity, and AI identities are fundamentally different,” Gnanasambandam said, describing 12 to 18 months of deep engineering work. The result is what he calls a unified lineage: “From human to master agent to sub agent to tool to application to data. That’s what I call the steel chain. That is in one data model, one platform.”

Why rival identity vendors joined Snowflake’s coalition — and what each side gets out of it

Perhaps the most striking aspect of today’s announcement is the roster. 1Password, SailPoint, Saviynt, Okta, and Aembit compete for overlapping identity and access budgets. Snowflake convinced them to build against a common trust framework anyway.

“The reason we brought together leaders across the security ecosystem is because no single company can solve the agent security challenge alone. AI agents can’t deliver real value if they only operate within the boundaries of one platform,” Upadhyay said. His broader thesis frames the whole strategy: “Nobody wants to replace data silos with AI silos.”

Wang offered a pragmatic division of labor: “We bring the trust, and Snowflake brings a system of record.” She framed the collaboration as classic defense in depth — “there are data level controls, and there are identity level controls, and so together we can create a much stronger ecosystem play.”

There is self-interest in the openness, of course. Snowflake sits atop an enormous concentration of sensitive enterprise data — more than 13,900 customers, by the company’s count — and every third-party agent that touches that data through a governed Snowflake gateway deepens the platform’s gravitational pull.

As Constellation Research analyst Michael Ni put it when the Natoma deal was announced, in comments reported by CIO.com: data platforms won the analytics era, and whoever governs agents, context, and autonomous actions wins the agentic one. A Forbes analysis of the same acquisition flagged the tension directly, noting that a governance layer living inside Snowflake risks pulling MCP’s openness back toward a single vendor’s control plane — attractive for Snowflake-standardized shops, more awkward for genuinely multi-vendor agent stacks.

Analyst forecasts show agent governance is now a trillion-dollar race against the clock

The urgency behind today’s announcement is not manufactured. Gartner predicts that by 2027, governance gaps discovered only after production incidents will force 40% of enterprises to demote or decommission autonomous AI agents — with analysts there warning that the greatest risk an agent poses often lies not in its output but in the actions it is empowered to take. IDC, meanwhile, expects more than 1 billion actively deployed AI agents by 2029, executing roughly 217 billion actions per day, and forecasts agentic AI will exceed $1.3 trillion in worldwide IT spending that year. The research firm’s analysts now argue agentic platforms should be treated as decision infrastructure, not productivity software.

Against that backdrop, the identity layer is becoming the contested ground, and every major vendor — Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Google, Okta — is racing toward the same runtime-governance chokepoint. Snowflake’s differentiator is proximity to the data itself. As Upadhyay put it, security “can’t just be an API proxy sitting in front of an LLM. It has to anchor all the way down into the underlying data layer, enforcing zero-copy boundaries, dynamic data masking, and real-time exfiltration safeguards before an agent ever touches a row of data.”

The rollout now moves to proving ground. Cortex AI Gateway enters public preview soon, and the five partner integrations enter private preview, a phase Wang described as a deliberate feedback loop — customers on day one get an agent-access broker plus “a full audit log that will show you, for example, what that agent is actually doing,” even when an agent deviates from its intent. Gnanasambandam, characteristically, wants enterprises to skip the easy demos entirely, urging customers to bring loan-origination workflows spanning three clouds and ten applications, half of them mainframes: “Give us that complex use case and bring anyone on and do it in your context, and we will take the challenge with anyone in the world.”

That confidence — from a coalition of rivals, no less — captures what makes this moment unusual. The companies that spent the last decade fighting over who verifies human identity have concluded, more or less simultaneously, that the next decade belongs to whoever can verify the machines acting on our behalf. Upadhyay distilled the wager into a single line: “The future of AI won’t be won by the organizations with the most agents, but by the organizations that can govern those agents with the most trust, visibility, and control.” In the agentic enterprise, it turns out, trust isn’t the guardrail. It’s the product.

Presented by Vijil

In dynamic environments where users, data, workflows and attack techniques change continuously after deployment, AI agent trust has become a runtime problem. Most organizations still treat trust as a pre-deployment exercise, declaring an agent production-ready and launching it after it passes sandbox evaluations and performs successfully in security tests. Unfortunately, that trustworthiness breaks down the moment an agent begins interacting with the real world.

“The core of the problem is that CIOs and business owners think about AI systems the way they think about SaaS or mobile applications, which do not respond dynamically to the world around them,” says Vin Sharma, Founder and CEO of Vijil. “Agents, by the textbook definition, are meant to perceive their environment, reason, act, observe the consequences, and learn from the gap between expectation and reality. The problem is that the models underneath them are built from static training data, and that picture of the world is already outdated by the time they reach production.”

Why benchmark scores fall short for agentic system trustworthiness

Traditional AI evaluations offer a point-in-time assessment of agent capability, rather than trustworthiness. There are three reasons why that assessment fails to predict real enterprise behavior:

First, benchmarks are static, built around a particular notion of what good performance means when they were developed, while the world keeps moving ahead.

Secondly, they model reality imperfectly, so that the gap between the benchmark and the real world is exactly where many failures occur.

And third, benchmarks are public, so they leak into future models’ training data, letting models effectively memorize the test rather than prove real capability..

“The agent or the application could score exceptionally well on a benchmark, but there’s that gap between that benchmark and the real world,” Sharma says.” Doing well only proves it can pass the test, not that it’ll perform reliably in production.”

But overall, benchmarks fall short precisely because they measure capability, not trustworthiness.

“We tend to think of agents as factotums, generally utilitarian agents to whom you can delegate certain types of tasks,” Sharma says. “But what we need to do is actually assign an objective that demands they always perform with the duty of competence, duty of care, and duty of loyalty to the enterprise.”

Of course, agents are not conscious and cannot be expected to feel actual human loyalty, but under the law, fiduciary duty doesn’t actually require consciousness. It just means that the agent should be bound to place the interests of the principal above its own or anyone else’s, as a functional requirement, and testable regardless of intention.

Capability and trustworthiness are different questions

Prioritizing trustworthiness over capability requires rethinking what enterprises expect from AI agents. Sharma calls that model the fiduciary agent, a term borrowed from professions that are bound by a formal duty of care, such as financial institutions or healthcare providers who owe their clients duties of competence, care, and loyalty. It addresses a critical issue in today’s industry: the focus almost entirely on competence, with little attention paid to whether an agent is beholden to the interests of the principal delegating work to it.

Testing starts from a working definition: an agent is trustworthy if the benefit of delegating a task to it exceeds the risk of that task’s failure. It’s an equation spelled out in economic terms that executives can act on directly, and risk breaks down to three components:

• reliability, or whether the agent performs as expected under varying conditions

• security, or its resistance to attacks from malicious actors

• and safety, or how contained the damage stays when failure eventually happens.

“The resulting score can be compared to a consumer credit rating, but built from behavioral data,” Sharma explains. “Meanwhile, testing methodology should be centered around three Ps: purpose, personas, and policies.”

At Vijil, purpose-based testing adapts to the specific workflow an agent handles, growing harder or easier depending on performance, similar to a computer-administered exam. Persona-based testing draws on more than a thousand demographically varied user profiles alongside adversary profiles, from ethical hackers to state-sponsored attackers, to simulate the range of people and threats an agent might encounter. Policy-based testing builds a custom harness from an organization’s own rules, whether they come from regulation, an internal privacy policy, or brand guidelines, and measures how far an agent strays when it violates them.

The trust failures that only emerge in production

Many failures cannot surface during pre-production testing because they arise from change in the environment itself. Machine learning has previously described this as data drift and concept drift, and for a CIO or CSO it means the people interacting with an agent differ from those the agent was planned for, and those users behave in ways that only become visible in production. At the same time, new attacks are emerging with increasing frequency as organizations push general-purpose agents into specialized enterprise roles they weren’t designed for and cannot easily constrain once deployed.

Multi-agent systems also introduce a brand-new category of failure that can’t be detected at the individual agent level, when agent systems act against the interests of the principal. For instance, collusion can occur when agents work together — one coding agent generates code while a second tests it, and behind the scenes both agree to leave a backdoor or flaw intact rather than flag it. Or agents divvy up tasks or responsibilities between themselves rather than focusing on their assigned tasks.

“What’s no longer in question is whether this is possible. It’s proven to exist,” Sharma said. “Is it six, 12, 18 months from now that you should worry about collusion among AI agents? I think it’s sooner than that. We’ve left the era of failure prevention. Now we have to think in terms of resilience: How quickly do you recover from failures in production?”

What continuous trust management looks like in practice

Operationally, continuous trust management goes back to those longstanding principles of observability and control, applied across the lifecycle of an agent population:

The first step is discovery, bringing shadow AI and ungoverned agents into the governance fold.

The second is assigning each agent a standards-based workload identity distinct from that of its human principal, which allows organizations to grant agents narrowly restricted permissions for their delegated tasks.

The third is policy-based control enforced through a mandatory enforcement point in the agent, instead of leaving it to the developer’s discretion.

From there, two new KPIs emerge: time to trust and time to recovery. Time to trust is how long it takes an organization to move from intention to a production deployment it can stand behind. Time to recovery is the interval between when a vulnerability is detected and when it gets fixed.

New organizational responsibility for this work may fall to a chief AI officer or be shared across GRC, CIO and CSO functions, Sharma says. Meanwhile, multi-agent systems will reshape how organizations view trust, rather than fit into current narrow definitions.

“Trust is not a vibe. Trust is not a virtue,” Sharma said. “It is something that you build into the infrastructure of your systems, so that it is continuous. It’s trackable, measurable. It allows your systems and your organization to improve continuously.”

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