Permissions for Snowflake AI models

This reference covers the privileges the Atlan service account needs to crawl AI models and extract lineage from the Snowflake Model Registry, what each privilege enables, and how to grant it.

For standard Snowflake connector permissions, see Set up Snowflake.

Base privileges

These privileges are required for Atlan to connect to Snowflake and query model metadata. They apply in addition to standard connector permissions.

Privilege	Scope	What it enables
USAGE	Warehouse	Required to execute any query. Atlan uses the warehouse to run all metadata extraction and lineage queries.
USAGE	Database containing models	Required to access the database where the Model Registry resides. Without this, the database is inaccessible.
USAGE	Schema containing models	Required to access schemas within the database. Without this, models within a schema can't be listed or queried.
USAGE	INFORMATION_SCHEMA	Required to query INFORMATION_SCHEMA.MODEL_VERSIONS, which Atlan uses to enumerate registered models.
SELECT	Tables and views	Required to resolve lineage relationships. Atlan confirms that upstream tables and views referenced by GET_LINEAGE() exist and maps them as assets.

Model privileges

The USAGE privilege on each model object is required for two independent reasons:

Reason	What happens without it
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.MODEL_VERSIONS only returns models that the querying role has USAGE on	Models without this grant are invisible to the crawler—they're silently excluded from the crawl results
SNOWFLAKE.CORE.GET_LINEAGE() requires USAGE on the model to resolve its upstream dependencies	Lineage extraction is silently skipped for that model version

Both model crawling and lineage extraction fail silently when USAGE is missing on a model—there is no error, the model is simply omitted.

See also

• Crawl Snowflake AI models: Configure the crawler to discover and catalog AI models.