Snowflake has made a splash in the race for enterprise artificial intelligence. The cloud data company announced an expansion of its partnership with Anthropic, the creators of the Claude models, through a multi-year agreement valued at $200 million that focuses on a very specific goal: deploying AI agents on the critical data of the world’s largest companies.
The move isn’t just about “adding another model” to their catalog. The alliance combines Anthropic’s Claude models—including the latest versions like Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.5—with Snowflake’s governed data infrastructure and Cortex AI capabilities, with the aim of moving agentic AI from experimentation to the core of business processes.
Agentic AI over the data that already matters
One of the key messages of the announcement is that Claude will be directly integrated into the environment where over 12,600 Snowflake global customers’ data already resides, regardless of whether they operate on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, or Microsoft Azure.
Until now, thousands of organizations already used Snowflake Cortex AI to consume Anthropic models and process billions of Claude tokens per month, mainly for specific tasks such as summarization, classification, or document analysis. The new phase of the partnership goes further:
- The focus shifts to AI agents capable of chaining multiple steps.
- These agents can decide what data they need, run queries (including complex SQL), combine sources, and return justified answers.
- According to Snowflake’s internal benchmarks, Claude-based agents exceed 90% accuracy in advanced text-to-SQL tasks.
In practical terms, a business user can ask, “How have our SaaS margins evolved in Europe over the past three years, and which segments are declining?” and receive not just a number, but an analysis supported by tables, breakdowns, and context—without writing a single line of SQL.
An AI “brain” for Snowflake’s Data Cloud
The alliance is built on several technical pillars within the platform:
- Snowflake Intelligence: a business intelligence agent powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5 that responds in natural language based on structured and unstructured data.
- Snowflake Cortex AI Functions: enable invoking Claude models—including Opus 4.5—directly from SQL to work with text, images, audio, and tabular data.
- Snowflake Cortex Agents: a framework for building production-ready data agents that retrieve and reason over different sources within Snowflake’s governed environment.
- Snowflake Horizon Catalog: the governance and observability layer ensuring traceability, access controls, and responsible AI policies.
The result is a native “AI layer” over the Data Cloud: Anthropic’s models don’t sit in an external silo but are integrated with the data catalog, security policies, and compliance rules that companies already have in place.
Security and compliance as prerequisites
The partnership is clearly aimed at sectors where fears over data control have slowed the adoption of generative AI: financial services, healthcare, insurance, or life sciences.
By operating within Snowflake’s perimeter:
- Data does not need to leave to external environments for AI processing.
- Agent queries are logged and auditable.
- Risk and compliance teams can see which tables were queried, for what purpose, and under which permissions.
In this context, Claude acts not as an “opaque oracle” but as a co-pilot that shows its work: which sources it consulted, how it interpreted the question, and the steps it took to arrive at the answer.
Use cases: from engineering to sales and private banking
The agreement is also supported by Snowflake’s internal use of Anthropic’s models:
- Claude Code helps boost engineering team productivity by speeding up refactoring, test generation, and code exploration.
- An go-to-market assistant based on Claude, integrated into Snowflake Intelligence, helps sales teams query data on sales, opportunities, and metrics in natural language to shorten negotiation cycles.
Among clients, use cases are beginning to proliferate:
- Customer data platforms like Simon Data use Claude on Snowflake to uncover behavioral patterns while maintaining strict governance policies.
- Intercom leverages Anthropic models via Snowflake Cortex AI to enhance its Fin AI Agent capabilities and increase the percentage of fully automated support queries.
- A wealth management firm can orchestrate agents that combine portfolio positions, market data, and compliance rules to generate personalized recommendations—all within the secure perimeter of the AI Data Cloud.
A “nine-figure” alliance in the enterprise AI race
From a strategic perspective, the partnership places Anthropic at the core of Snowflake’s push for multi-cloud enterprise AI. Claude is currently the only frontier model available natively across the three major public clouds, enabling clients to deploy consistent agent logic wherever their workloads reside.
For Snowflake, the goal is to reinforce its narrative as a platform where data, governance, and AI converge—countering the growing competition from other cloud providers also vying for control of the “layer of intelligence” within enterprises.
For Anthropic, the deal solidifies Claude as a model designed not just for chatting, but for reasoning with critical data, explaining its decisions, and operating within the security limits demanded by large corporate clients.
The big question now is how many of those 12,600 organizations will move from isolated pilots to deeply integrated AI agents embedded in their financial, operational, and commercial processes. The Snowflake–Anthropic alliance aims to make that leap less risky… and much harder for the rest of the market to ignore.