Pulse News

**Google, Anthropic Discuss AI Data Security Deals With Snowflake, Databricks**

By Kevin McLaughlin

Mar 11, 2025, 8:00am PDT

After Sridhar Ramaswamy became CEO of database provider Snowflake a year ago, customers such as banks and healthcare firms said they might move their business elsewhere because they felt they couldn't safely access artificial intelligence from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google through Snowflake's core product. Some customers considered switching to rival products from Amazon and Microsoft that grant access to cutting-edge AI while preventing customers' business data from leaking to the AI providers—a key requirement for many of them—according to a Snowflake employee.

Ramaswamy is now poised to fill the gaps and boost revenue. In the latest example, Snowflake is in talks with Google about making its Gemini models available securely for customers to build AI applications, such as those that automate processing insurance claims or creating ads, the employee said.

**The Takeaway**

- Large enterprises worry about leaking proprietary data to AI providers.

- Snowflake's and Databricks' data security deals could attract more AI business from regulated industries.

- Snowflake expects deals for OpenAI and Anthropic models to boost revenue.

Snowflake's efforts have sparked a reaction from Databricks, a fierce rival. Executives from Databricks recently talked with Anthropic about a similar agreement that would let Databricks customers more easily build applications with the AI startup's models, said a Databricks manager involved in the discussions. Such data-sharing guarantees are particularly important for highly regulated companies in fields like finance and pharmaceuticals, which typically don't want proprietary information to end up in the hands of AI providers that could incorporate the information in their models or leak it to other customers, a Snowflake employee said.

The talks come after Snowflake recently completed a similar deal with Anthropic as well as Microsoft, which lets Snowflake customers use OpenAI and Anthropic models without sharing data with those AI startups. (Microsoft exclusively resells OpenAI models in the cloud.) Snowflake's deals with Microsoft and OpenAI and with Anthropic are each on track to drive tens of millions of dollars of annual spending by Snowflake customers, according to the employee. That's because Snowflake has traditionally generated revenue based on the amount of computing and storage capacity its customers use while analyzing their data, and building AI applications is a new area of business it expects will drive additional computing activity.

**Joining Hands**

Database providers are striking deals so customers can quickly and securely access AI from leading firms. Green cells show existing partnerships, while yellow cells represent potential partnerships.

- Snowflake

- Google Cloud

- Amazon Web Services

- Microsoft Azure

- Databricks

- Meta Llama

- Anthropic Claude

- OpenAI Models

- Google Gemini

The AI partnerships could help Snowflake stem its recent slide in annual revenue growth, which has fallen from 70% to 30% over the past two years. By the same token, these partnerships help the AI firms reach new customers in regulated fields that have hesitated to use some AI products due to security or accuracy concerns.

In an interview, a senior Snowflake executive implied that not striking such deals would leave "a gap in our product offering." But in an emailed statement, Baris Gultekin, head of AI at Snowflake, downplayed the idea that customers may have switched database providers, saying he had "never heard anyone say that they'd leave our platform because we didn't host a certain model."

**Demand For Anthropic**

Snowflake representatives had worked for more than a year to get Anthropic and Microsoft to discuss a partnership, according to a current Snowflake employee. In lieu of those deals, Snowflake struck agreements with lesser-known AI developers Reka and Mistral AI, as well as Meta Platforms, which makes an open-source AI model known as Llama. But usage of these companies' AI models has lagged that of OpenAI's and Anthropic's models.

Last year, Snowflake's lack of support for Anthropic models became a particular issue, raising the prospect that the company would lose major deals with customers, the employee said. More businesses are getting comfortable building conversational AI applications trained on their corporate data to automate tasks such as coding, analyzing financial performance, or answering employee questions about IT problems, human resources, or other policies as long as their data doesn't leak to other parties.

The growing AI market has pressured database providers like Snowflake and Databricks to make it easier for their customers to use AI models with security and privacy guarantees, and without extra hassles.

**Creating Duplicates**

Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google all sell access to powerful AI models through an application programming interface, which runs on the public cloud servers. While most data is encrypted while traveling over the internet, it becomes visible once it reaches these companies' servers. Big companies have already entrusted the cloud providers with their sensitive data, but many don't have the same level of trust in the AI startups, said a person who does business with Fortune 500 firms.

Until now, Snowflake customers that have wanted to use OpenAI or Anthropic models had to create duplicates of their corporate data before sending it to the servers of those startups. Databricks customers that run applications on Microsoft's Azure cloud can securely access OpenAI models without moving or duplicating their data because Microsoft hosts Databricks' and OpenAI's products. But Databricks customers that want to use Anthropic don't have the same option unless they use Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, which host Anthropic's models.

The deals between database firms and AI developers mean database customers don't have to jump through those hoops anymore. Another advantage of the recent AI agreements is that Snowflake customers can pay for their cloud and AI model usage on the same bill.

A spokesperson from Google Cloud declined to comment for this article. Spokespeople from Databricks, OpenAI, and Anthropic didn't have a comment.

Kevin McLaughlin has been a reporter at The Information since 2016, covering cloud computing, enterprise software, and artificial intelligence. He is based in San Francisco and you can find him on Twitter @KevKubernetes.