Hi Stephanie -- glad to see you using the AnVIL package, and AnVIL! I'm not able to log in to AnVIL at the moment due to this https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us/articles/4410497584155-Service-Incident-November-16-2021-Google- , but will try to investigate once the issue is resolved. In the mean time you might try updating the AnVIL package to the 'devel' version BiocManager::install("Bioconductor/AnVIL") , and also walking through the top-level function debug(avtable_import) (launch a shell in AnVIL, and start R for an interactive session) and guessing whether things are making sense, especially the values at the line response <- Terra()$flexibleImportEntities(namespace, name, entities). Also, I'm assuming you're using this within the AnVIL workspace that contains the table (you can do other more complicated things, like accessing one workspace from another, and accessing AnVIL from the desktop, as mentioned in the Quick Start portion of the Introduction to AnVIL vignettte).

Hmm, I'm not sure what the problem is. For instance in a workspace I own and through an (R-based) Jupyter notebook, I can do

avtables()  # nothing
as_tibble(mtcars, rownames = "brand_id") |>
    mutate(brand_id = make.names(brand_id)) |>
    avtable_import()
avtables() # 'brand'

If I try to access a workspace I don't have permissions for, I get a 403 error, rather than the 401 that you saw...

avworkspace("anvil-datastorage/1000G-high-coverage-2019")
as_tibble(mtcars, rownames = "brand_id") |>
    mutate(brand_id = make.names(brand_id)) |>
    avtable_import()
## Error: 'avtable_import' failed:
##   Forbidden (HTTP 403).
##   insufficient permissions to perform operation on anvil-datastorage/1000G-high-coverage-2019
## Traceback:
## 
## 1. avtable_import(mutate(as_tibble(mtcars, rownames = "brand_id"), 
##  .     brand_id = make.names(brand_id)))
## 2. .avstop_for_status(response, "avtable_import")
## 3. stop(message, call. = FALSE)

so I'm a little stymied... Does

httr::with_verbose(
    avtable_import(samples, entity="sample_id")
)

produce anything useful in the response portion? For instance, I see

<- HTTP/1.1 200 OK
<- Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:05:17 GMT
<- Server: akka-http/10.2.4
<- X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
<- X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
<- X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
<- Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
<- Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
<- Access-Control-Allow-Headers: authorization,content-type,accept,origin,x-app-id
<- Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET,POST,PUT,PATCH,DELETE,OPTIONS,HEAD
<- Access-Control-Max-Age: 1728000
<- Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
<- Content-Length: 5
<- Via: 1.1 google
<- Alt-Svc: clear
<-

(be sure to remove any Authorization: fields from what you post here...) Also, was your session active for an hour or more? Access tokens expire, but the AnVIL package is supposed to generate new ones...)