AIF-C01 is AWS's foundational AI certification: 65 questions in 90 minutes, five content domains heavy on generative AI, and a 700 passing score, with no prerequisites. This guide covers the format, what is tested, who it is for, and how to prepare.
Last updated July 2026.
AIF-C01 is the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam, a foundational-tier credential aimed at people who use, evaluate, or support AI and machine learning solutions on AWS without necessarily building them. It validates that you understand core AI and ML concepts, generative AI and foundation models, responsible AI practices, and the AWS services that deliver them, such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker.
There are no required prerequisites. AWS describes the target candidate as having up to six months of exposure to AI and ML technologies on AWS. It suits product, business, and non-ML technical roles that need AI fluency, and it pairs naturally with Cloud Practitioner as a second foundational credential.
| AIF-C01 | |
|---|---|
| Level | Foundational |
| Total questions | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored) |
| Time limit | 90 minutes |
| Passing score | 700 (on a 100 to 1,000 scale) |
| Cost | $100 USD |
| Question types | Multiple choice, multiple response, and others |
| Validity | 3 years |
| Delivery | Pearson VUE testing center or online proctored |
All figures from the official AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam guide. The 15 unscored questions are not identified during the exam and do not affect your result.
The 50 scored questions are spread across five domains. AWS uses a compensatory scoring model, so you pass on your overall scaled score, not domain by domain. Generative AI and foundation models together make up more than half the exam.
Baseline vocabulary: the difference between AI, machine learning, and deep learning; supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning; common use cases; and the basics of the ML lifecycle from data collection through inference. This is the conceptual grounding the rest of the exam builds on.
Core generative AI concepts: what foundation models and large language models are, tokens and embeddings, prompt engineering basics, and the capabilities and limitations of generative systems. It also covers AWS services for generative AI, with Amazon Bedrock as the central service.
The largest domain. It covers putting foundation models to work: design considerations for applications, prompt engineering techniques, fine-tuning versus retrieval-augmented generation, evaluating model performance, and the AWS tooling that supports these patterns. This is where the most exam questions live, so it deserves the most study time.
Responsible and trustworthy AI: bias and fairness, transparency and explainability, and the trade-offs involved in deploying AI responsibly. AWS features such as Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Clarify appear here.
Securing and governing AI workloads: data protection, IAM and access control for AI services, and compliance and governance considerations specific to AI. It overlaps with general AWS security concepts but applies them to AI and ML data and models.
For a foundational exam that leans heavily on current generative AI concepts, a focused plan works well:
If you already hold Cloud Practitioner, the security and governance domain will feel familiar. If AI is new to you, budget the most time for the two generative AI domains, since that is where the unfamiliar concepts concentrate.
AIF-C01 is a foundational credential, so it proves fluency rather than engineering skill. Its value is timing: it is one of the first vendor certifications built around generative AI and foundation models, which makes it a credible signal for roles that increasingly touch AI. As a low-cost, no-prerequisite exam, it is a reasonable way to formalise AI knowledge or to complement Cloud Practitioner before moving toward the associate-level Machine Learning Engineer path. Like all AWS certifications, it is valid for three years.
AIF-C01 is a foundational-level certification, the same tier as Cloud Practitioner. It has no prerequisites and focuses on understanding AI concepts and AWS AI services rather than building them.
The exam has 65 questions in total, 50 of which are scored. The minimum passing score is 700 on a scale of 100 to 1,000.
The exam is $100 USD, before any applicable taxes, and runs for 90 minutes.
They are both foundational and have no prerequisites, so either can come first. Cloud Practitioner covers broad AWS fundamentals, while AIF-C01 focuses on AI and generative AI. Many people take Cloud Practitioner first for general grounding, then AIF-C01 to specialise.
Yes. Generative AI is a major focus: the Fundamentals of Generative AI (24%) and Applications of Foundation Models (28%) domains together make up 52% of the scored content, including Amazon Bedrock, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation.
The AIF-C01 exam guide lists every task statement, the domain weights, and the in-scope AWS AI services. It is the primary prep document and it is free.
Open the AWS exam guide →