diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index daf88f284ab..6c574f19946 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -194,7 +194,7 @@
     "scipy",
     "sentencepiece",  # for bleurt
     "seqeval",
-    "sqlalchemy",
+    "sqlalchemy<2.0.0",
     "spacy>=3.0.0",
     "tldextract",
     # to speed up pip backtracking