diff --git a/libs/core/langchain_core/language_models/base.py b/libs/core/langchain_core/language_models/base.py
index 2a8aeece46a..6fa7486ca60 100644
--- a/libs/core/langchain_core/language_models/base.py
+++ b/libs/core/langchain_core/language_models/base.py
@@ -87,13 +87,28 @@ def get_tokenizer() -> Any:
     return GPT2TokenizerFast.from_pretrained("gpt2")
 
 
+_GPT2_TOKENIZER_WARNED = False
+
+
 def _get_token_ids_default_method(text: str) -> list[int]:
-    """Encode the text into token IDs."""
-    # get the cached tokenizer
+    """Encode the text into token IDs using the fallback GPT-2 tokenizer."""
+    global _GPT2_TOKENIZER_WARNED  # noqa: PLW0603
+    if not _GPT2_TOKENIZER_WARNED:
+        warnings.warn(
+            "Using fallback GPT-2 tokenizer for token counting. "
+            "Token counts may be inaccurate for non-GPT-2 models. "
+            "For accurate counts, use a model-specific method if available.",
+            stacklevel=3,
+        )
+        _GPT2_TOKENIZER_WARNED = True
+
     tokenizer = get_tokenizer()
 
-    # tokenize the text using the GPT-2 tokenizer
-    return cast("list[int]", tokenizer.encode(text))
+    # Pass verbose=False to suppress the "Token indices sequence length is longer than
+    # the specified maximum sequence length" warning from HuggingFace. This warning is
+    # about GPT-2's 1024 token context limit, but we're only using the tokenizer for
+    # counting, not for model input.
+    return cast("list[int]", tokenizer.encode(text, verbose=False))
 
 
 LanguageModelInput = PromptValue | str | Sequence[MessageLikeRepresentation]