Bedrock Data expands free Snowflake Cortex governance

Bedrock Data has expanded its free Snowflake offering to include Snowflake Cortex, adding agent discovery and agent cards for Cortex users.

The update builds on Bedrock Data Free for Snowflake following an earlier investment from Snowflake Ventures. It is aimed at customers using AI agents on data stored in Snowflake, giving them visibility into which data those agents can access and what types of sensitive information they touch.

Companies adopting Cortex AI need to understand how agents interact with corporate data, especially when employee, customer or payment information is involved. The new features are intended to help security and governance teams identify those links early and document them for reviews and audits.

The expanded service includes continuous discovery of schemas and tables in a Snowflake environment, along with classification of the data they contain. It identifies categories such as personally identifiable information, payment card information, protected health information and non-public information.

It also adds classification by business domain, including intellectual property and financial data. This is meant to give teams more context when deciding which data sets should be available to specific AI agents.

A second part of the update focuses on Cortex agents themselves. Bedrock Data now automatically discovers each Cortex agent in a customer's Snowflake environment and creates an agent card showing which tables and views the agent can access, which sensitive data types those assets contain and which tools the agent uses to access them.

These records can be used by security and governance teams as evidence for internal reviews and regulatory audits. The free tier is designed to give Snowflake customers a way to map both their underlying data and the AI services built on top of it without upfront cost.

Governance focus

The announcement comes as companies race to deploy generative AI and agent-based systems in business processes while trying to maintain control over access to sensitive data. In practice, weak visibility creates the risk that an AI agent built for one function, such as human resources, could expose confidential information to users or teams that should not have access.

Bedrock Data's broader ArgusAI product already covers agents across Amazon Bedrock, Snowflake Cortex AI, ChatGPT Enterprise and Google Vertex AI through a single policy model, according to the company. The Snowflake update brings part of that governance approach into the free tier for Snowflake customers.

Teams can also write and enforce policies in plain English within Snowflake Horizon. That ties the new Cortex features to Snowflake's broader governance and catalog framework, which many customers already use to track data assets and controls.

Bruno Kurtic, chief executive officer and co-founder of Bedrock Data, said the expansion reflects the pace of adoption among Snowflake users. "Snowflake customers are moving quickly to adopt Cortex AI, which raises the bar for data visibility and governance," he said.

He added: "With the expanded Bedrock Data Free for Snowflake, teams can classify sensitive data across their environment and see how every Cortex agent interacts with it - from day one and at no cost."

The expanded free offering is available now. The latest changes place greater emphasis on documenting how AI agents connect to data assets, an area becoming more important as businesses seek evidence that internal rules and external regulatory requirements are being met.