# Token Authentication Fails for MLPerf Mixtral Model Access via CLI

**URL:** <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/token-authentication-fails-for-mlperf-mixtral-model-access-via-cli/166748>\
**Category:** Beginners\
**Created:** [August 13, 2025, 10:07pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/token-authentication-fails-for-mlperf-mixtral-model-access-via-cli/166748 "2025-08-13T22:07:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nwakou](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/nwakou/32/52567_2.png) [@nwakou](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/nwakou)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2025, 10:07pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/token-authentication-fails-for-mlperf-mixtral-model-access-via-cli/166748/1 "2025-08-13T22:07:27Z")

</div>

```auto
Hi Hugging Face team and community,

I’m currently working on MLPerf inference benchmarking and need to download the Mixtral-8x7B checkpoint using the `mlcr` CLI tool.

I’ve encountered repeated issues with token authentication:

- Tokens generated via the Hugging Face website are only 37 characters long,not sure if that is an issue with the new versions. I have heard of 40.
- Attempts to use these tokens with `curl` and `mlcr` result in “Invalid credentials in Authorization header.”
- I’ve tried both fine-grained and non-fine-grained tokens with read access.
- I can log in via the browser and have accepted the model’s license terms.

Is there a known issue with token generation or CLI authentication? Any help or workaround would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

— Nicholas Wakou 

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John6666](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/hellohellohello/user_avatar/discuss.huggingface.co/john6666/32/27664_2.png) [@John6666](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/John6666)\
**Post date:** [August 13, 2025, 11:57pm UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/token-authentication-fails-for-mlperf-mixtral-model-access-via-cli/166748/2 "2025-08-13T23:57:47Z")

</div>

HF tokens are _often 37 characters long, including the `hf_` prefix and the characters that follow_. However, now that you mention it, I’m not sure if the character count is actually fixed…😅

There are rare cases where the token content becomes corrupted due to shortcut key operations during copy-paste in the GUI, etc. So I recommend [testing the token’s validity using `whoami-v2`](https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/api#get-apiwhoami-v2).

```bash
export HF_TOKEN='hf_...'
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $HF_TOKEN" https://huggingface.co/api/whoami-v2

```