Claude Certified Architect - Foundations

The exam at a glance

For solution architects designing production Claude systems. All figures below are the official ones, published in the exam guide and shared across the four Claude exams.

Exam code

CCAR-F

Price

$125

Questions

60

Duration

120 minutes

Scoring

Scaled 100 to 1,000

Pass mark

720

Who it is for

For solution architects designing production Claude systems

The 5 exam domains, by weight

The percentages are the official domain weights: they tell you where the questions are concentrated and where your study time pays off most.

• 1. Agentic Architecture & Orchestration27%
• 2. Tool Design & MCP Integration18%
• 3. Claude Code Configuration & Workflows20%
• 4. Prompt Engineering & Structured Output20%
• 5. Context Management & Reliability15%

Official preparation

Anthropic publishes an official preparation course for this exam, Claude Certified Architect - Foundations, with a dedicated prep-courses page and a public exam page. The course pages are public to read; enrolling requires Claude Partner Network access, which in practice means working for a partner organisation.

We deliberately do not reproduce those courses' lesson lists or Anthropic's descriptions of them here. That curriculum is Anthropic's work; our rule is to reference and link to official material, never to reproduce it. So we point you to it, and note that enrolling needs partner access.

The prep-courses page lists seven recommended courses: AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, Claude with the Anthropic API, Claude with Google Vertex, Claude Code in Action, Claude 101, Claude in Amazon Bedrock, and Introduction to Model Context Protocol.

Two of the seven cover deployment on cloud platforms, Google Vertex and Amazon Bedrock, which the domain list does not make obvious. It signals that this exam touches running Claude on those platforms, not only the direct API.

Learning this without partner access

The certification is gated, but the skills it tests are not, and the exam domains are a good map of what it takes to design production Claude systems whether or not you can sit the exam.

The official exam page on the Partner Academy is public to read, even though registering there is not: the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations exam page.

The official prep sits on the partner portal, but the same courses are reachable through public routes that need no Partner Network account. The Anthropic course catalogue lists them with lecture counts and lengths, among them Claude 101, Claude with the Anthropic API, Claude with Google Vertex, Claude in Amazon Bedrock, Claude Code in Action, and Introduction to Model Context Protocol. AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations is hosted free on anthropic.com. Several of the same courses are also on Coursera, an alternative route for anyone who prefers that platform.

One public starting point applies to every exam: the free Claude Partner Network learning path, on the public catalogue rather than the partner portal, which Anthropic describes as the first step toward unlocking certification. It needs no partner access.

Domain by domain

For each exam domain, the public official resources come first, then the matching Sentievo concept pages. The Sentievo links reuse the same domain-to-concept map that powers our Study Plan Generator.

Practise this exam

Reading gets you the concepts; questions tell you whether they stuck. Sentievo's practice follows the official CCAR-F domains and weights, and the first domain is free with no signup.