diff --git a/llama.cpp b/llama.cpp
index 86a3467be..a94d37a31 100644
--- a/llama.cpp
+++ b/llama.cpp
@@ -4595,20 +4595,14 @@ static void llm_load_vocab(
             vocab.special_cls_id  = 101;
             vocab.special_mask_id = 103;
             vocab.add_space_prefix = false;
-        } else {
-            if (tokenizer_model == "gpt2") {
-                vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_BPE;
+        } else if (tokenizer_model == "gpt2") {
+            vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_BPE;
 
-                const int add_space_prefix_keyidx = gguf_find_key(ctx, kv(LLM_KV_TOKENIZER_ADD_PREFIX).c_str());
-                if (add_space_prefix_keyidx != -1) {
-                    vocab.add_space_prefix = gguf_get_val_bool(ctx, add_space_prefix_keyidx);
-                }
-            } else {
-                LLAMA_LOG_WARN("%s: unknown tokenizer: '%s'", __func__, tokenizer_model.c_str());
-                LLAMA_LOG_WARN("%s: using default tokenizer: 'llama'", __func__);
-                vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_SPM;
-                return;
+            const int add_space_prefix_keyidx = gguf_find_key(ctx, kv(LLM_KV_TOKENIZER_ADD_PREFIX).c_str());
+            if (add_space_prefix_keyidx != -1) {
+                vocab.add_space_prefix = gguf_get_val_bool(ctx, add_space_prefix_keyidx);
             }
+
             // read bpe merges and populate bpe ranks
             const int merges_keyidx = gguf_find_key(ctx, kv(LLM_KV_TOKENIZER_MERGES).c_str());
             if (merges_keyidx == -1) {
@@ -4642,6 +4636,8 @@ static void llm_load_vocab(
             vocab.special_pad_id  = -1;
             vocab.special_cls_id  = -1;
             vocab.special_mask_id = -1;
+        } else {
+            throw std::runtime_error(format("unknown tokenizer: '%s'", tokenizer_model.c_str()));
         }
 
         // for now, only BPE models have pre-tokenizers