diff --git a/requirements.txt b/requirements.txt
index 26dcdecb1..415b4b503 100644
--- a/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements.txt
@@ -11,7 +11,8 @@ pydantic-settings>=2.14.1
 SQLAlchemy
 pypdf
 pypdfium2
-Pillow
+# Pillow 13 fixes known image-processing advisories; keep local embeddings compatible.
+Pillow>=13.0.0
 faster-whisper
 pdfplumber
 beautifulsoup4
@@ -25,7 +26,7 @@ numpy
 chromadb-client
 # gRPC vendors independent roots; 1.84.1 removes the incident trust anchors.
 grpcio>=1.84.1
-fastembed
+fastembed>=0.9.1
 youtube-transcript-api
 yt-dlp
 # Markdown rendering for research reports (src/visual_report.py).