Anthropic is quickly proving to be the enterprise AI model provider that other vendors want to work with.
Snowflake develops a data platform that serves as both a data warehouse and an analytics service provider.
Anthropic and Snowflake unveiled a partnership in November 2024.
Expanded Partnerships
On Dec. 3, the vendor revealed that it has expanded its partnership with Snowflake.
The multi-year partnership is worth $200 million. Under the deal, Anthropic Claude models will be available on the Snowflake platform to more than 12,600 global customers across Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure.
The partnership also creates a go-to-market initiative focused on deploying AI agents across enterprises, Anthropic said.
The partnership combines Claude’s reasoning capabilities with Snowflake’s governed data environment. Business users can ask questions in natural language, enabling Claude to determine the necessary data and retrieve it across a business’s Snowflake environment, providing answers.
The partnership is another way Anthropic continues to establish key strategic relationships and integrate Claude into every environment in which enterprises operate. For example, last month Anthropic revealed a partnership with Microsoft in which the cloud provider will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, and Anthropic will purchase $30 billion in Azure computing capacity over the next few years.
The rapid and sustained growth Anthropic has been experiencing, particularly in terms of partnering with large vendors and the fact that many other vendors are using Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol standard, demonstrates just how respected the vendor is, said Bradley Shimmin, an analyst at Futurum Group. Anthropic models are known for their coding prowess, and the company’s “constitutional AI” philosophy serves as the foundation for Anthropic’s stated focus on safe and explainable AI.
“They are not only well regarded as the gold standard of agentic code development but also … they have done a lot more than we have seen from competitors like OpenAI in spending time and money on trying to make generative AI a responsible platform to go build on,” Shimmin said. “Everyone who’s investing in this sees that and says, ‘This is to me that we should partner with.'”
Since Anthropic is a vendor many want to work with, this expanded partnership with Snowflake will help the cloud-based data vendor.
“Snowflake should have an easier time selling its platform when the LLM [large language model (LLM)] part is backed by a top frontier AI vendor who will work with them on integration and make sure they have early access to new models,” said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. “In return, Anthropic receives access to Snowflake’s large customer base and receives guaranteed revenue at the same time.”
Some Risks
However, both vendors are taking some risks with the partnership.
“Any integration in terms of UI and tooling will make it harder for Snowflake to move on to another platform,” Volk said.
For Anthropic, there is a risk associated with relying heavily on big channel partners that are also competitors, Volk continued, referring to hyperscalers such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft. “At the same time, having its product white labelled deprives them of the positive marketing effect that comes from, hopefully, happy users.”