diff --git a/CHANGELOG.rst b/CHANGELOG.rst
index 6687ebd31ea..742c0d71525 100755
--- a/CHANGELOG.rst
+++ b/CHANGELOG.rst
@@ -43,6 +43,7 @@ Changelog
 - Update HuggingFace checkpoint export to use name-based tied-weight deduplication instead of the previous address-based approach. The address-based deduplication could incorrectly drop an untied weight that happened to share memory with a tied one, producing an incomplete checkpoint (observed as a false positive on MiniMax-M2.7).
 - Fix EAGLE-3 training with context parallelism (``--cp_size > 1`` in ``examples/speculative_decoding``), which failed to start on ``accelerate >= 1.13`` and then raised ``got mixed torch.Tensor and DTensor``.
 - Polygraphy minimum dependency upgraded to ``0.53.4`` to solve ONNX AutoCast failures when marking optional graph outputs.
+- Fix ``ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'huggingface_hub'`` when importing ``modelopt.torch`` without the optional ``hf`` extra. Install the ``hf`` extra to use Hugging Face checkpointing. Affects 0.44 through 0.46.
 
 0.46 (2026-08-17)
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
diff --git a/modelopt/torch/opt/plugins/__init__.py b/modelopt/torch/opt/plugins/__init__.py
index b86ef1eb7f3..bd74fd76a97 100644
--- a/modelopt/torch/opt/plugins/__init__.py
+++ b/modelopt/torch/opt/plugins/__init__.py
@@ -17,7 +17,8 @@
 
 from modelopt.torch.utils import import_plugin
 
-from .huggingface import *
+with import_plugin("huggingface_hub"):
+    from .huggingface import *
 
 with import_plugin("megatron core dist checkpointing"):
     from .mcore_dist_checkpointing import *