The OPERATE privilege is specifically required to pause or resume pipes in Snowflake, as confirmed by the community discussion where the comment with 2 upvotes explicitly states that 'A non-owner role with the OPERATE privilege on the pipe can pause or resume a pipe (using ALTER PIPE ... SET PIPE_EXECUTION_PAUSED = TRUE | FALSE).' While USAGE privilege is required on the database and schema containing the pipe for SQL operations, it is not the specific privilege needed for pausing/resuming the pipe itself. READ privilege allows reading pipe metadata but not modifying pipe execution state. SELECT is not applicable to pipes as they are not tables.