Releasesby GlyphSnowflake recommends transitioning from Cortex Analyst to Cortex Agents
Snowflake recommends transitioning to Cortex Agents , which supports every Cortex Analyst capability with higher answer quality. Snowflake adds new natural language analytics capabilities to Cortex Agents.
Also shipped Aug 28, 2026Snowflake in August 2026 →
Monitor and cap external provider costs
Unity Gateway can now track and cap spend on external model providers, such as Amazon Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry, not just Databricks-provided models. If your organization already has capacity commitments directly with a provider, Unity Gateway becomes the single point to track that usage and enforce spend limits across teams and use cases.
Unity Catalog Skills (Beta)
You can now publish, govern, and share agent skills with Unity Catalog. A skill is a first-class Unity Catalog securable ( catalog.schema.skill ) that follows the SKILL.md specification , so you register it once and control who can discover, use, and update it with the same permissions, tags, and audit that protect your tables.
Looker visual modeling canvas for BigQuery enters preview
A drag-and-drop canvas builds and edits LookML models on BigQuery sources: join tables, define dimensions and measures, preview results and publish Explores without writing LookML.
Conversational Analytics verified queries , also known as golden queries , are now generally available
Conversational Analytics verified queries , also known as golden queries , are now generally available. You can also now define verified queries in Looker (Google Cloud core) instances.
Now available in preview, model localization is supported for imported projects
Now available in preview, model localization is supported for imported projects. By default, Looker uses the locale definitions from the importing project only, if the importing project has locale definitions.
More from Snowflake Cortex AIEvery Snowflake Cortex AI release →
Cortex Agents asynchronous API (General availability)
The Cortex Agents asynchronous API is now generally available on AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Cortex Extension references in agent skills (General availability)
Referencing a Cortex Extension from an agent skill is now generally available. Set the skill source type to CORTEX_EXTENSION and path to the extension's fully qualified name, and Snowflake expands the reference into the extension's member skills at request time, so you don't list each skill individually.
Cortex Agents Coding Agent (General availability)
The Cortex Agents Coding Agent is now generally available. Add the code_toolset_all tool type to a Cortex Agent, and Snowflake provisions and manages a sandbox backed by the same runtime that powers Snowflake CoCo: bash, file read/write/edit, grep, glob, web search, SQL execution, and skills.
Snowflake Native Apps: Code execution tools for Cortex Agents
Providers can now add the code_execution and code_toolset_all sandbox tools to Cortex Agents created by a Snowflake Native App.
Data lineage for Cortex Agents
You can now use data lineage to see which data a Cortex Agent can reach through the tools declared in its specification. A semantic view that a Cortex Analyst tool references, and a Cortex Search service that a Cortex Search tool references, both appear upstream of the agent.
Restricted Session Scope for agents (General availability)
With this release, Restricted Session Scope (RSS) is generally available. An RSS is a privilege ceiling that limits what an agent can do on behalf of a user. It intersects with RBAC and never grants privileges the user doesn't already have through their roles.
Version targeting for Cortex Agent and Cortex Analyst evaluations (General availability)
Cortex Agent and Cortex Analyst evaluations now let you control the versioned configuration used for scoring: Version targeting pins the configuration under evaluation, not the agent behavior that gets evaluated: each run invokes the agent again and scores a newly generated trace.
AI_EXTRACT and AI_PARSE_DOCUMENT support for client-side encrypted stages and network-restricted accounts (General availability)
AI_EXTRACT and AI_PARSE_DOCUMENT now support documents stored on stages that use client-side or server-side encryption, including in accounts that use PrivateLink or other network policies that restrict public network access to stages. For more information, see the following topics: