diff --git a/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py b/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py
index d6690dda560ebe..5684cad1e077f1 100644
--- a/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py
+++ b/src/transformers/tokenization_utils_fast.py
@@ -16,7 +16,6 @@
  Tokenization classes for fast tokenizers (provided by HuggingFace's tokenizers library). For slow (python) tokenizers
  see tokenization_utils.py
 """
-import copy
 import json
 import os
 from collections import defaultdict
@@ -105,7 +104,7 @@ def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
             )
 
         if tokenizer_object is not None:
-            fast_tokenizer = copy.deepcopy(tokenizer_object)
+            fast_tokenizer = tokenizer_object
         elif fast_tokenizer_file is not None and not from_slow:
             # We have a serialization from tokenizers which let us directly build the backend
             fast_tokenizer = TokenizerFast.from_file(fast_tokenizer_file)