diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index f5fcaa11b..b013e863c 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -18,6 +18,7 @@ and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0
 ### Fixed
 
 - Don't log garbage on nodes that aren't rank 0
+- Don't crash in the HF code when we are referring to a tokenizer in a local file
 
 
 ## [v0.2.5](https://github.com/allenai/OLMo/releases/tag/v0.2.5) - 2024-03-06
diff --git a/olmo/tokenizer.py b/olmo/tokenizer.py
index 3ed064097..625ce45e9 100644
--- a/olmo/tokenizer.py
+++ b/olmo/tokenizer.py
@@ -111,11 +111,18 @@ def from_checkpoint(cls, checkpoint_dir: PathOrStr) -> Tokenizer:
         model_config = ModelConfig.load(config_path, key="model")
 
         # Initialize tokenizer and validate vocab size.
-        tokenizer = cls.from_pretrained(
-            tokenizer_config.identifier,
-            eos_token_id=model_config.eos_token_id,
-            pad_token_id=model_config.pad_token_id,
-        )
+        if Path(tokenizer_config.identifier).is_file():
+            tokenizer = cls.from_file(
+                tokenizer_config.identifier,
+                eos_token_id=model_config.eos_token_id,
+                pad_token_id=model_config.pad_token_id,
+            )
+        else:
+            tokenizer = cls.from_pretrained(
+                tokenizer_config.identifier,
+                eos_token_id=model_config.eos_token_id,
+                pad_token_id=model_config.pad_token_id,
+            )
         if model_config.vocab_size != tokenizer.vocab_size:
             raise OLMoConfigurationError("vocab size mismatch between config and tokenizer")
         return tokenizer