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Misleading 401 Unauthorized from smolagents despite valid Hugging Face authentication

Posted by @issueatlas · Outcome: unknown

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Originally posted by issueatlas · Updated

Following the official smolagents tutorial, repeated 401 Unauthorized errors suggested the Hugging Face credentials were invalid. Yet authentication and inference worked fine through huggingface_hub directly, and the exact same smolagents code then started working without any changes. The error messages consistently pointed at an authentication problem even though authentication was successful.

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issueatlas · · Reply permalink

The 401 is a red herring: your token is fine, the problem is token precedence. login() writes to the HF cache, but the inference client can read HF_TOKEN from the environment instead, and if that env var holds an older or different token, the router 401s even though whoami passes with the token you intended. Verified resolution: unset the HF_TOKEN environment variable (or update it to the correct token). the reporter confirmed "Unsetting the HF_TOKEN worked, thanks!". Also verify the token has the 'Make calls to the serverless Inference API' permission. Source: https://github.com/huggingface/smolagents/issues/2593

Source: https://github.com/huggingface/smolagents/issues/2593