Snowflake puts Cortex AI Gateway into public preview on AWS

Snowflake has put Cortex AI Gateway into public preview, giving customers one endpoint for governed model inference, request monitoring and cost controls. The preview is available to accounts in AWS commercial regions except Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Malaysia) and Europe (Spain).

Instead of maintaining a separate connection for every supported model provider, applications can send requests through the gateway. Snowflake’s documentation lists three capabilities in the current preview: inference, observability and cost management. Model-routing automation, gateway-wide AI guardrails and MCP tool governance are not part of that public-preview scope.

For Cortex AI inference, the gateway implements the Chat Completions API for OpenAI, Grok, GLM, Gemini, Llama, Mistral and DeepSeek models, along with the Messages API for Claude. Snowflake says support for the OpenAI Responses API is coming soon. Using the gateway does not expand a user’s model permissions; access still depends on the models and functions that user can already invoke.

Each account gets a single gateway object named SNOWFLAKE. According to Snowflake’s product documentation, USAGE is granted to PUBLIC by default, though administrators can revoke that grant and assign access through role-based controls. Snowflake says this setup, configurable model exposure and account-level audit records can strengthen governance and security. Its public materials do not include a customer-validated measure of security improvement.

With logging enabled, the gateway records metadata such as the caller, selected model, token counts, timing and errors. It captures prompts and model responses only when an administrator separately enables payload capture. Existing Snowflake budgets and per-user quotas can apply to gateway traffic. AI_GATEWAY_USAGE_HISTORY and linked agent traces provide data for attributing spend and investigating requests. Snowflake says these controls can help prevent unplanned costs, but its public materials do not quantify customer-validated savings from the gateway.

Two prominently described functions have narrower availability. Tools in Cortex AI Gateway, which Snowflake says includes a curated catalog of more than 100 Model Context Protocol servers and tool-level controls, is in private preview. Snowflake also says support for extending Cortex AI Guardrails to third-party traffic passing through the gateway is coming soon, rather than included in the current public preview.

Dynamic model routing is not part of the live public preview either. Snowflake says the feature is coming to private preview and is designed to select the least expensive available model that can confidently handle a task. In company testing on a dbt pipeline workload, Snowflake says routing delivered up to three times greater token efficiency at comparable quality. It separately reported roughly 25% lower token use while pull-request throughput held steady. The figures come from Snowflake’s internal tests, whose methodology is available on request, and the company says results may vary.

Snowflake has not given firm availability dates for dynamic routing, gateway-wide guardrails or Responses API support. It also has not announced a general-availability date for Cortex AI Gateway.