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Soon after announcing its earnings for the third quarter of FY25, Snowflake dropped a bombshell: It is teaming up with leading AI vendor Anthropic to further advance AI projects for its customers.
The data ecosystem giant has signed a multi-year strategic agreement, bringing Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 family of models to its core platform on AWS. The move will allow enterprises using Snowflake to leverage the cutting-edge Claude large language models (LLMs) for building advanced AI applications, including conversational agents. The engagement will also power Snowflake’s customer-facing agentic offerings as well as help the company’s employees accelerate their internal workflows.
The partnership comes as the latest in a series of efforts by Snowflake to provide enterprises with everything they need to develop secure and governed generative AI applications using their data hosted on the company’s platform. Just recently, it even announced observability capabilities, enabling users to keep a close eye on the performance of the LLM applications they develop on their Snowflake instance.
Interestingly, this strategy is similar to that of Databricks, Snowflake’s biggest competitor, which also offers a range of open-source and proprietary models. In fact, the Ali Ghodsi-led company already allows customers (in its own way) to integrate proprietary external models, including those from Anthropic.
Claude 3.5 family directly available on Snowflake
Last year, Neeva co-founder Sridhar Ramaswamy took over as the CEO of Snowflake, marking a new chapter of AI resurgence for the data company. It began dropping new AI capabilities, allowing customers to not only accelerate their data workflows on the platform (like with text-to-SQL) but also enable powerful AI-based use cases. One such offering that made headlines last year was Cortex, a fully managed service to build LLM apps.
Cortex provides enterprises using data cloud with a suite of AI building blocks, including multiple LLMs, to analyze data they have on the platform – with the same security and privacy of Snowflake – and build applications targeting different business-specific use cases. The company started with LLMs for specialized tasks such as sentiment analysis and soon had a roster of several open models, including those from Google, Meta and Mistral, and a few proprietary ones.
Now, as the next step in this work, the company has partnered with Anthropic to bring its proprietary Claude 3.5 family of models to Cortex AI. The move is significant as it allows Snowflake’s 10,000+ customers to power their gen AI app experiences with Cla …