en.Wedoany.com Reported - On May 15, US-based data security platform provider Bedrock Data announced the expansion of its free offering for Snowflake, Bedrock Data Free for Snowflake, extending AI governance capabilities to the Snowflake Cortex AI agent layer. The free tier now includes Cortex agent auto-discovery and agent card features, enabling enterprises to gain complete visibility into AI agent data access behaviors at zero cost, providing governance infrastructure for the large-scale deployment of Cortex AI.
This expansion builds upon Snowflake Ventures' previous strategic investment in Bedrock Data. Bruno Kurtic, Co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Data, stated: "Snowflake customers are rapidly adopting Cortex AI, which places higher demands on data visibility and governance. With the expanded Bedrock Data Free for Snowflake, teams can classify sensitive data across their entire environment and see how every Cortex agent interacts with it—from day one, at zero cost."
The free tier offers two core capabilities. The first is continuous data discovery and classification: it automatically discovers schemas and tables within the Snowflake environment and classifies the sensitive data they contain, covering four major categories: Personally Identifiable Information, Payment Card Information, Protected Health Information, and non-public information. This update adds classification by business domain, enabling the identification of intellectual property and financial data, providing teams with richer context for determining which datasets should be exposed to specific AI agents.
The second is the ArgusAI Cortex Agent Discovery and Agent Card feature. The system automatically discovers every Cortex agent in the customer's Snowflake environment and generates an agent card for each, clearly displaying the tables and views the agent can access, the types of sensitive data these assets contain, and the tools the agent uses to access this data. Security and governance teams can use agent cards as structured evidence for internal reviews and regulatory audits. According to Bedrock Data's official technical blog, the access model of Cortex agents makes governance more challenging than traditional SQL auditing: Cortex Analyst tool calls are mediated by the agent runtime, the Cortex Search service queries via REST APIs rather than SQL statements, and the agent specification itself defines multi-tool orchestration paths. Traditional SQL-based governance approaches cannot fully cover these access surfaces.
In terms of application logic, when enterprises adopt Cortex AI agents, they must ensure that the agent's handling of employee, customer, or payment information complies with internal policies and external regulations. Without visibility, an AI agent built for one function could expose confidential data to users or teams without proper access rights. According to Bedrock Data's "2025 Enterprise Data Security Confidence Index," 60% of security teams have assumed AI governance responsibilities, yet 53% still lack real-time visibility into sensitive data assets. By incorporating agent visibility into the free tier, Bedrock Data enables Snowflake customers to establish a data access mapping and classification baseline from the very first day of deploying Cortex agents.
Bedrock Data's ArgusAI product already covers Amazon Bedrock, Snowflake Cortex AI, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Google Vertex AI, managing multi-platform AI agents through a unified policy model. Its underlying architecture uses a metadata lake, creating an inventory of data assets associated with AI systems through a "Data Bill of Materials" that encompasses classification, sensitivity, authorization chains, regulatory context, and lineage information. This Snowflake free tier opens up some governance capabilities to Snowflake customers, and the free product integrates with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, allowing users to write and enforce natural language policies within Snowflake Horizon. Bedrock Data Free for Snowflake is now officially available and will be demonstrated live at Snowflake Summit 2026, taking place June 1-4 in San Francisco, USA.
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