Oct 19, 2026: Cortex Tools for Cortex AI Gateway (Preview)

We are pleased to announce the preview of Cortex Tools, a part of Cortex AI Gateway that connects the AI clients your organization uses to the business tools your work already lives in, using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Supported clients include CoCo Desktop, CoCo CLI, Claude, and Cursor.

Currently, only users with the ACCOUNTADMIN role can administer MCP servers in Cortex Tools. As an administrator, you control which MCP servers your users can reach, which tools each server exposes, and review tool-call activity.

With this preview, you can:

  • Enable servers from a curated catalog of MCP servers for services such as Atlassian, GitHub, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, and Snowflake. Complete any provider-specific setup before enabling a server. For the full list, see Available MCP servers.
  • Distribute access to end users by enabling servers that CoCo Desktop and CLI discover automatically. For automatic Snowflake client configuration, grant the SNOWFLAKE$OPS.MCP$USER database role to each account role that has access to the MCP server. Users still complete any required authorization with the third-party service. For details, see Distributing access to MCP servers.
  • Limit what AI can do by configuring which tools a server exposes, for example allowing read-only tools while keeping write and delete tools unavailable. For details, see Configuring tool availability for an MCP server.
  • Add a custom MCP server that isn’t in the catalog by providing its URL, which is useful for internal tools and your own integrations. For details, see Adding a custom MCP server.
  • Review tool-call activity in your Snowflake account with the AGENT_TRACE_TABLE table function, or use the Activity catalog. For details, see Viewing agent activity.

To get started, sign in to Snowsight and select AI & ML > AI Gateway > MCP & Tools.

For more information, see Cortex Tools.