What happened
On Oct 30, 2026 Snowflake announced general availability of Restricted Session Scopes (RSS), letting admins and end users define a privilege ceiling that automatically applies whenever an AI agent session is detected. It enforces least privilege for Cortex Agents, CoCo, CoWork, MCP integrations and OAuth-identified external agents at account-wide, per-user and per-session levels, pairing with Agent Identity (also GA) to answer both 'what did the agent do' and 'what was it allowed to do.'
Why it matters
RSS is a native, in-platform answer to the biggest agent security problem: agents inherit the user's standing privileges and can surgically raise/lower that ceiling at runtime without re-architecting RBAC. It operationalizes the task-scoped-boundary principle regulators and frameworks are pushing toward, and ships GA inside a data platform most enterprises already run.
Applicability
Snowflake customers deploying Cortex Agents, CoCo or MCP-connected agents should configure an RSS session policy now — start with the built-in read-only SNOWFLAKE$DATA_READ_WITH_AI scope and block administrative/data-governor roles before enabling agent write access.