Forum Discussion
Advocate IIOwnership of Semantic Models
A service principal cannot automatically become the owner of all semantic models across the entire organisation in the way a traditional service account (user identity) can. Power BI treats ownership as a user-level property, and service principals are app-based identities rather than user identities, so they don’t inherently “own” content. However, a service principal can be granted access and admin-level permissions to semantic models if it's added as a workspace Admin or assigned via APIs or deployment pipelines. The practical approach is to use a service principal for automation and CI/CD access, while letting actual user identities remain as dataset owners, or programmatically reassign ownership per dataset if needed. In summary, a service principal can't blanket-own all semantic models, but it can be configured to manage and control them with the correct workspace and tenant permissions.
Super UserHi. Yes. You can take ownership of a semantic model with a service principal using Power Bi Rest API. This is the request:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/take-over-in-group
You can help yourself with powershell cmdlets, or simplepbi (python lib) or just code the request.
I hope that helps