We are thrilled to announce the availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic’s most capable model to date, available to customers on Snowflake Cortex AI. With their multi-year partnership, Anthropic and Snowflake are committed to bringing generative AI innovations to customers. This latest offering helps enterprises develop and scale AI products in an easy, connected, and trusted way.

As a launch partner with Anthropic, we’re providing same-day availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5 (in public preview on Cortex AI). This model is available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Cortex AISQL and Cortex REST API, and will be coming soon in Cortex Agents (in public preview) and Snowflake Intelligence (in public preview). 

Improvements over Claude Sonnet 4

Claude Sonnet 4.5 delivers significant upgrades over its predecessor, with key improvements in the following areas:

• Enhanced domain knowledge: The model delivers highly consistent and reliable performance, following complex instructions with precision. It is particularly effective in specialized domains such as finance, research, and cybersecurity.

• Superior agentic capabilities: The model demonstrates exceptional creativity in using tools to solve novel problems it hasn’t encountered before. It features an enhanced ability to coordinate with sub-agents, enabling the execution of complex, multi-step workflows with improved reliability.

• State-of-the-art coding and computer use: Claude Sonnet 4.5 sets a new standard in coding, achieving a higher state-of-the-art score on SWE-bench Verified, with even greater performance using custom tooling. For computer use, it operates with increased reliability, accurately clicking buttons, filling forms, and recovering from errors to complete tasks successfully.

What you can do with Sonnet 4.5 on Snowflake 

Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 joins other leading frontier models in Cortex AI, enabling a wide range of enterprise use cases, all within Snowflake’s secure, governed environment. The Sonnet 4.5 model is well-suited to:

• Transform data into actionable intelligence. With Snowflake Intelligence powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5, business users can ask complex questions in natural language to get precise insights from structured and unstructured data. The model excels at specialized tasks, from advanced financial forecasting and intelligent risk management to automating procurement workflows and producing high-quality, production-ready reports by combining its domain expertise with Snowflake’s industry-leading governance.

• Analyze multimodal data with unparalleled precision. Within Cortex AISQL, analysts can use Claude Sonnet 4.5’s optimal balance of speed and cost directly within the data warehouse. Native SQL functions unlock cost-efficient AI pipelines that can classify, filter, and synthesize complex insights from text, images, and other unstructured data, turning the model’s frontier performance into a simple, scalable analytics tool. 

• Build intelligent systems with Cortex Agents powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic’s most advanced model for long-running, complex tasks. With state-of-the-art performance across financial analysis, research, multi-step enterprise tasks, and orchestrating across cross-functional workflows, Sonnet 4.5 enables agents to plan, reason, and act reliably at scale. Customers can build agents that shift from just reactive detection to a proactive patching of vulnerabilities. It brings major improvements in tool use, memory management, and computer navigation, allowing Cortex Agents to tackle sophisticated business processes with higher accuracy, resilience, and speed, all backed by Snowflake’s secure retrieval stack across both structured and unstructured data.

Fig 1: Snowflake Cortex AI features

Snowflake Cortex AI is a suite of integrated features and services that include fully managed LLM inference and easy retrieval of data, so that customers can quickly analyze unstructured data alongside their structured data and expedite the building of agentic AI applications. Cortex’s unified AI and data platform helps organizations turn AI concepts into reality in days. Enterprises of all sizes and industries can now implement a range of use cases from text summarization and sentiment analysis to the development of powerful AI agents. 

Using Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Snowflake

With Cortex AI, accessing models is easy. You can simply access Sonnet 4.5 in one of the supported regions. In non-supported regions, you can access it with cross-region inference enabled. 

Cortex AISQL

Cortex AISQL makes it easy to build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data using familiar SQL. Cortex AISQL delivers high-performance processing at a lower cost than manually orchestrated AI pipelines, enabling trusted insights across the enterprise while maintaining the security and governance capabilities Snowflake is known for. For example, with the AI_COMPLETE function, analysts can apply natural language instructions directly in SQL, leveraging state-of-the-art models like Sonnet 4.5.

Fig 2: Q2 FY26 Snowflake earnings presentation slide

Cortex REST API

To make low-latency inference calls to Cortex AI for native apps, developers can simply use the REST API interface. Here is an example of what that looks like:

Looking ahead

Snowflake prioritizes security and privacy of enterprise data and Anthropic is dedicated to building secure, reliable AI — creating strong alignment in delivering cutting-edge innovations. The Sonnet 4.5 model is now available in public preview within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Cortex AISQL functions and the REST API, and will be available soon for use with Cortex Agents and Snowflake Intelligence. 

Learn more

• Download A Practical Guide to AI Agents.

• Try out Snowflake Intelligence today. 

• Watch the demo to see Cortex AISQL in action. 

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_{This article contains forward-looking statements, including about our future product offerings, and are not commitments to deliver any product offerings. Actual results and offerings may differ and are subject to known and unknown risk and uncertainties. See our latest 10-Q for more information.}