# Misleading 401 Unauthorized from smolagents despite valid Hugging Face authentication
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.
## How to handle it
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