diff --git a/scripts/get_chat_template.py b/scripts/get_chat_template.py
index d8143e400..b4827b317 100755
--- a/scripts/get_chat_template.py
+++ b/scripts/get_chat_template.py
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ def get_chat_template(model_id, variant=None):
         # Use huggingface_hub library if available.
         # Allows access to gated models if the user has access and ran `huggingface-cli login`.
         from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
-        with open(hf_hub_download(repo_id=model_id, filename="tokenizer_config.json")) as f:
+        with open(hf_hub_download(repo_id=model_id, filename="tokenizer_config.json"), encoding="utf-8") as f:
             config_str = f.read()
     except ImportError:
         import requests