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Crawl Snowflake AI models

Atlan can discover and catalog AI models—and their registered versions—stored in the Snowflake Model Registry. Once crawled, model assets appear in Atlan alongside your other Snowflake assets, with upstream lineage built automatically using Snowflake's native lineage function. Model crawling requires the Direct extraction strategy with the Information Schema method and isn't supported with the Account Usage method or any offline extraction strategy.

Prerequisites​

Before crawling AI models, make sure you have:

Permissions required​

In addition to the standard Snowflake connector permissions, the Atlan service account requires:

  • USAGE on the warehouse, and on each database and schema containing models
  • USAGE on INFORMATION_SCHEMA for the Information Schema extraction method
  • SELECT on tables and views used for lineage relationships
  • USAGE on each model—required both for INFORMATION_SCHEMA.MODEL_VERSIONS to list models and for SNOWFLAKE.CORE.GET_LINEAGE() to retrieve their upstream dependencies

Grant model usage permissions with:

-- Grant USAGE on all existing models in a schema
GRANT USAGE ON ALL MODELS IN SCHEMA <database_name>.<schema_name> TO ROLE <atlan_role>;

-- Grant USAGE on future models (recommended)
GRANT USAGE ON FUTURE MODELS IN SCHEMA <database_name>.<schema_name> TO ROLE <atlan_role>;

Repeat these grants for each database and schema containing models you want to crawl. Without the FUTURE grant, every newly registered model requires a manual re-grant before Atlan can crawl it.

For the full breakdown of each privilege and what it enables, see Permissions for Snowflake AI models.

Configure crawler​

To configure the crawler for AI models:

  1. Follow the standard Crawl Snowflake steps.
  2. When selecting the extraction method, choose Information Schema.
  3. Under asset filters, specify which databases or schemas to crawl:
    • To include specific databases or schemas, configure Include Metadata filters.
    • To exclude specific databases or schemas, configure Exclude Metadata filters.
    • If no filters are set, Atlan crawls all databases and schemas accessible to the service account, including any models within them.
  4. Run the workflow.

After the workflow completes, AI Model and AI Model Version assets appear in Atlan under the crawled schema. Navigate to any AI Model Version asset to see its upstream lineage, resolved by GET_LINEAGE() up to 5 levels deep.

See also​