diff --git a/tokenizers/src/utils/parallelism.rs b/tokenizers/src/utils/parallelism.rs
index 2ac2eaa80..b955731d1 100644
--- a/tokenizers/src/utils/parallelism.rs
+++ b/tokenizers/src/utils/parallelism.rs
@@ -5,14 +5,15 @@
 use rayon::iter::IterBridge;
 use rayon::prelude::*;
 use rayon_cond::CondIterator;
+use std::sync::atomic::AtomicBool;
+use std::sync::atomic::Ordering;
 
 // Re-export rayon current_num_threads
 pub use rayon::current_num_threads;
 
 pub const ENV_VARIABLE: &str = "TOKENIZERS_PARALLELISM";
 
-// Reading/Writing this variable should always happen on the main thread
-static mut USED_PARALLELISM: bool = false;
+static USED_PARALLELISM: AtomicBool = AtomicBool::new(false);
 
 /// Check if the TOKENIZERS_PARALLELISM env variable has been explicitly set
 pub fn is_parallelism_configured() -> bool {
@@ -21,7 +22,7 @@ pub fn is_parallelism_configured() -> bool {
 
 /// Check if at some point we used a parallel iterator
 pub fn has_parallelism_been_used() -> bool {
-    unsafe { USED_PARALLELISM }
+    USED_PARALLELISM.load(Ordering::SeqCst)
 }
 
 /// Get the currently set value for `TOKENIZERS_PARALLELISM` env variable
@@ -70,7 +71,7 @@ where
     fn into_maybe_par_iter(self) -> CondIterator<P, S> {
         let parallelism = get_parallelism();
         if parallelism {
-            unsafe { USED_PARALLELISM = true };
+            USED_PARALLELISM.store(true, Ordering::SeqCst);
         }
         CondIterator::new(self, parallelism)
     }
@@ -159,7 +160,7 @@ where
         let iter = CondIterator::from_serial(self);
 
         if get_parallelism() {
-            unsafe { USED_PARALLELISM = true };
+            USED_PARALLELISM.store(true, Ordering::SeqCst);
             CondIterator::from_parallel(iter.into_parallel().right().unwrap())
         } else {
             iter