Snowflake brings Claude Sonnet 5.5 to Cortex AI in public preview

Snowflake has opened public-preview access to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 through Cortex AI Functions and the Cortex REST API, according to a September 30 release note. For Snowflake customers, that means two routes are available now: Cortex AI Functions and application access through the REST API.

Developers can call the claude-sonnet-5-5 model from applications through their Snowflake account endpoint. Snowflake’s September 28 announcement shows the Anthropic SDK configured to use the Snowflake Cortex endpoint. The company says the setup keeps customer data within its security and governance perimeter, a claim the supplied sources do not independently validate.

The release note also says the preview supports cross-region inference when CORTEX_ENABLED_CROSS_REGION is set to AWS_US, AWS_GLOBAL or ANY_REGION. None of the supplied sources gives a general-availability date.

That September 30 update revised part of the rollout Snowflake had described two days earlier. The September 28 announcement listed Cortex AI Functions with CoCo, CoWork and Cortex Agents as “coming soon.” Cortex AI Functions is now documented as available in public preview. The supplied official sources do not establish current Claude Sonnet 5.5 support in CoCo, CoWork or Cortex Agents, and Snowflake says its forward-looking product statements are not commitments to deliver.

The Snowflake rollout provides one deployment route for Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 launch. Anthropic describes the model as suited to well-scoped work such as bug fixes and document creation. The company says it generates output more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and reports a 70.6% Terminal-Bench 4.0 score, versus 10.3% for Sonnet 5. Those figures come from Anthropic’s own evaluations and have not been independently established by the supplied sources.