diff --git a/src/axolotl/cli/__init__.py b/src/axolotl/cli/__init__.py
index 52765a9b5..84586ccc3 100644
--- a/src/axolotl/cli/__init__.py
+++ b/src/axolotl/cli/__init__.py
@@ -272,7 +272,7 @@ def do_inference_gradio(
             importlib.import_module("axolotl.prompters"), prompter
         )
     elif cfg.chat_template:
-        chat_template_str = get_chat_template(cfg.chat_template)
+        chat_template_str = get_chat_template(cfg.chat_template, tokenizer=tokenizer)
 
     model = model.to(cfg.device, dtype=cfg.torch_dtype)
 
diff --git a/src/axolotl/core/trainer_builder.py b/src/axolotl/core/trainer_builder.py
index d125f838d..e47c09d51 100755
--- a/src/axolotl/core/trainer_builder.py
+++ b/src/axolotl/core/trainer_builder.py
@@ -1595,7 +1595,8 @@ class HFCausalTrainerBuilder(TrainerBuilderBase):
         training_arguments_kwargs["pretraining"] = bool(self.cfg.pretraining_dataset)
         if self.cfg.chat_template:
             training_arguments_kwargs["chat_template"] = get_chat_template(
-                self.cfg.chat_template
+                self.cfg.chat_template,
+                tokenizer=self.tokenizer,
             )
 
         if self.cfg.rl == "orpo":