diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index 8e4d75b..f4f271a 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ anthropic==0.118.0      # Anthropic LLM target
 streamlit==1.60.0       # Dashboard UI
 pandas>=2.2,<3         # Dashboard dataframes + tradeoff sweep (3.x not yet released)
 numpy>=2.0,<3           # Optional; metrics use pure-Python but dashboard may use numpy
-python-dotenv==1.2.2    # .env loading for API keys
+python-dotenv==1.2.4    # .env loading for API keys
 PyYAML==6.0.3           # configs/default.yaml parser
 
 # --- Dev / test ---