Announcing Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 on Snowflake Cortex AI
We are thrilled to announce the availability of Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic’s latest model, on Snowflake Cortex AI. As a launch partner with Anthropic, we're providing same-day availability of Claude Opus 4.8 in public preview. It is available within the secure Snowflake perimeter for use with Cortex Code, Cortex Agents, Cortex AI Functions, Cortex Inference, and Snowflake Intelligence.
Claude Opus 4.8
Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic’s latest model. It is highly autonomous and performs exceptionally well on long-horizon agentic work, knowledge work, and memory tasks. It builds on the strengths of previous Opus models and is stronger on professional work, including document drafting, data analysis, and presentations.
Source: Anthropic, May 28, 2026
What you can do with Claude Opus 4.8 on Snowflake
Opus 4.8 joins leading AI models in Snowflake Cortex AI, enabling a wide range of enterprise use cases, all within Snowflake’s security and governance perimeter. With Opus 4.8, you can:
Speed up development with Cortex Code: Snowflake’s AI coding agent understands your enterprise data, governance and workflows, enabling teams to go from idea to production quickly without breaking trust or impacting scale. Now, with Opus 4.8, Cortex Code enables improved reasoning, code generation, support for more complex, long-running tasks and agentic execution, bringing secure, Snowflake-aware assistance directly into Snowsight interface, the CLI and local dev tools. For data engineers, analysts and builders, it turns natural language into production-ready pipelines, analytics and AI agents — collapsing weeks of glue work into minutes, while staying governed, interoperable and enterprise-grade. You can try Claude Opus 4.8 in preview using the /model command within the CLI:
Build advanced personal work agents: Snowflake Intelligence introduces a new category of personal work agents designed to transform how organizations work, collaborate and innovate by fostering a truly data-driven culture. Every employee, regardless of technical expertise, can ask complex questions in natural language, uncover the “why” behind every “what,” and take confident action, all within Snowflake’s secure, governed perimeter. Claude Opus 4.8 on Snowflake Cortex AI extends this foundation with enhanced reasoning, stronger code generation, and support for more sophisticated agentic workflows. Teams can build advanced agents that reason across structured and unstructured enterprise data and orchestrate analytical and operational workflows securely within Snowflake.
Analyze structured and unstructured data with unparalleled precision: Cortex AI Functions make it easy to build scalable AI pipelines across multimodal enterprise data using SQL. Cortex AI Functions offer 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 models such as Opus 4.8.
SELECT AI_COMPLETE(
'claude-opus-4-8',
PROMPT('Review the following financial filing and summarize key revenue trends, margin changes, and any notable risk factors mentioned: {0}', my_table.filing)) FROM my_table
- Developers can build AI applications closer to their secure data: Use the Cortex Inference to build agentic enterprise applications within the Snowflake security perimeter. They can leverage new capabilities such as Opus 4.8’s adjustable effort levels, enabling the model to balance reasoning depth and latency on a task. Developers can get started quickly using the Anthropic SDK by pointing it to their Snowflake Cortex Inference endpoint, enabling a seamless integration with familiar Anthropic tooling.
import httpx
import anthropic
token = <snowflake_access_token>
http_client = httpx.Client(
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"},
verify=False, # Disable SSL verification for internal endpoints
)
client = anthropic.Anthropic(
api_key="not-used", # Required but overridden by Bearer auth
base_url="https://<snowflake_account_url>.snowflakecomputing.com/api/v2/cortex",
http_client=http_client,
default_headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"},
)
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-4-8",
max_tokens=1024,
messages=[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Pull the latest usage and billing details for customer ACME-4921 and flag anything unusual.",
}
],
)
print(response.content[0].text)
Enterprises want to move agentic AI into production fast. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, agents can handle complex, long-running tasks with greater consistency and reduced supervision, driving real work forward at scale. With multiple entry points from Cortex Code CLI to Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex AI Functions and Cortex Inference, customers can easily adopt this capability and accelerate their path to high-impact, production-ready agentic AI at scale.
Learn more
Read our launch announcement for Cortex Code and learn more about it here.
Learn more about Snowflake Intelligence here.
Gain insights from structured and unstructured data with Snowflake Intelligence via this quickstart.
Forward-looking statements
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.
