Claude Certified Architect – Foundations
The design-level exam. This is where you leave 'does the code work' behind and start defending choices about orchestration, isolation, reliability, and cost. Scenario-based: four scenarios drawn from a pool of six.
- Questions
- 60 (4 × 15)
- Duration
- 120 minutes
- Passing score
- 720 / 1000
- Validity
- 12 months
- Format
- Scenario — 4 of 6
- Delivery
- Online-proctored or Pearson VUE
- Counts toward CPN tier
- Yes
Your diagrams end up on VP whiteboards. You choose orchestration patterns and defend them.
You decide fork-vs-subagent, hook-vs-prompt, and when the Batch API pays for itself.
You own reliability and cost across a whole Claude solution, not a single endpoint.
Domain breakdown & weights
The heart of the exam — how work is decomposed, isolated, and coordinated.
- Context isolation: fork session vs spawn subagent
- The subagent trap — pass findings explicitly
- Delegation via the Task tool
- Single-agent vs multi-agent tradeoffs
Four scenarios, drawn from a pool of six.
Each scenario carries 15 questions. Prepare all six and you can afford to lose your weakest one. Knowing them up front tells you exactly which cross-domain skills to drill.
The distinctions it quietly leans on
Memorise which side of each split a question is testing — it eliminates wrong answers fast.
Free courses, in the right order.
Every course below is free on the Anthropic Academy. Work them top to bottom — tick each off to track your readiness.
Tap a course to mark it complete and watch your readiness climb.
Traps & high-value focus areas
Subagents never inherit the coordinator's context. 'Analyze the findings' fails — you must pass the findings text explicitly. Expect this exact distinction.
Any option that reaches for a routing classifier or tool consolidation before improving tool descriptions is almost always wrong.
If a failure has financial, security, or safety consequences, the answer is a programmatic hook or gate — not a prompt instruction.
Any option that reports only aggregate accuracy for a decision about reducing human review should be eliminated.
Ready to earn Architect?
Follow the mapped prep track, drill the mock exam, and book when your readiness says go.