safetensors
Safe and fast serialization format for machine learning model tensors used by Hugging Face and PyTorch.
ML and data science PyPI
Used in agent projects
22
0.2% of 12,697 public repos built with AI coding agents
Rank in ml and data science
#26 of 28
by use in those projects
Downloads
19.7M
PyPI, last 7 days, safetensors
GitHub stars
3,915
last push Oct 6, 2026
How safetensors is used
safetensors is a dependency in 22 of the 12,697 public GitHub projects set up for AI coding agents that we scanned (0.2%), #26 of 28 in ml and data science. The most used alternative there is NumPy. Projects that use it most often also use Hugging Face Transformers (95.5%), NumPy (90.9%), Hugging Face Hub (86.4%).
Often used with safetensors
| Hugging Face Transformers | 95.5% of safetensors projects · 151.5× more than average |
|---|---|
| NumPy | 90.9% of safetensors projects · 23.7× more than average |
| Hugging Face Hub | 86.4% of safetensors projects · 185.9× more than average |
| PyTorch | 86.4% of safetensors projects · 100.6× more than average |
| PyYAML | 77.3% of safetensors projects · 25.5× more than average |
| Pillow | 72.7% of safetensors projects · 31.6× more than average |
| SciPy | 72.7% of safetensors projects · 65.5× more than average |
| tokenizers | 72.7% of safetensors projects · 288.6× more than average |
By coding agent
| GitHub Copilot | 0.4% of projects set up for it |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | 0.3% of projects set up for it |
| Cursor | 0.2% of projects set up for it |
Share of public repos configured for each agent that list safetensors as a dependency.
Install
| Package | pip install safetensors |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | Python (20), Next.js (2) |
| Example projects | Llaminar/llaminar, ManojINaik/manimAnimationAgent, nihilistau/CosySim, brandoz2255/Harvis |
Alternatives to safetensors
| Tool | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NumPy pypi Fundamental Python library for numerical computing with arrays and matrices. |
487 (3.8%) | 21M | 33K | — |
| pandas pypi Data manipulation and analysis library with DataFrames for structured data. |
383 (3.0%) | 143M | 50K | — |
| scikit-learn pypi Python machine learning library with classification, regression and clustering algorithms. |
160 (1.3%) | 44.3M | 67.5K | — |
| SciPy pypi Fundamental algorithms for scientific computing with optimized numerical routines. |
141 (1.1%) | 72.2M | 15.1K | — |
| PyTorch pypi Deep learning framework with tensors and dynamic neural networks with GPU support. |
109 (0.9%) | 13.2M | 104K | — |
| Sentence Transformers pypi Pre-trained models for semantic embeddings, retrieval and reranking. |
83 (0.7%) | 5.1M | 19.2K | — |
| Hugging Face Transformers pypi State-of-the-art NLP and multimodal models for inference and training. |
80 (0.6%) | 24.8M | 167K | Apache 2.0 License |
| NetworkX pypi Python package for creating, analyzing and manipulating complex networks and graphs. |
73 (0.6%) | 50.2M | 17.3K | — |