diff --git a/litellm/_version.py b/litellm/_version.py
index 2034cc4f332..c3fc4c5b2f5 100644
--- a/litellm/_version.py
+++ b/litellm/_version.py
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-import importlib_metadata
+from importlib.metadata import PackageNotFoundError, version as _version
 
 try:
-    version = importlib_metadata.version("litellm")
-except Exception:
+    version = _version("litellm")
+except PackageNotFoundError:
     version = "unknown"
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 37b00373f8a..c13f4aad551 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -19,8 +19,7 @@ dependencies = [
     "openai>=2.20.0,<3.0.0",
     "python-dotenv>=1.0.0,<2.0",
     "tiktoken>=0.8.0,<1.0",
-    "importlib-metadata>=8.0.0,<9.0",
-    "tokenizers>=0.21.0,<1.0",
+"tokenizers>=0.21.0,<1.0",
     "click>=8.0.0,<9.0",
     "jinja2>=3.1.6,<4.0",
     "aiohttp>=3.14.2,<4.0",