diff --git a/benchmarks/rnnt/ootb/inference/requirements.txt b/benchmarks/rnnt/ootb/inference/requirements.txt
index 56e4bc4..445af39 100644
--- a/benchmarks/rnnt/ootb/inference/requirements.txt
+++ b/benchmarks/rnnt/ootb/inference/requirements.txt
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ pexpect==4.8.0
 pickleshare==0.7.5
 pluggy==1.0.0
 prompt-toolkit==3.0.29
-protobuf==3.20.2
+protobuf==7.34.0rc1
 ptyprocess==0.7.0
 py==1.11.0
 pygments==2.12.0