Anthropic · CCAR-P · Professional
Claude Certified Architect – Professional (CCAR-P)
Exam update: Anthropic has announced that an updated exam guide will be available from 17 November 2026 and that the exam will include updated content from 7 December 2026. Taking the exam on or after 7 December 2026? Study from the updated guide. Taking it before then? Study from the current guide (v1.0). We'll update this page once the new guide is out.
Mid- to senior-level solution architects, AI/ML engineers, technical leads and senior engineers who design, build and deliver production Claude solutions at enterprise scale and lead architectural/stakeholder decisions. Not for entry-level developers, casual users, or non-technical/prompt-only roles.
60 free practice questions · full timed mock exam · study plan
Exam facts
- How many questions are on the CCAR-P exam? 63 questions, multiple choice and multiple response.
- How long is the CCAR-P exam? 120 minutes.
- What is the CCAR-P pass mark? 720 scaled (100-1,000)
- How much does the CCAR-P exam cost? $175 USD before any partner discount.
- Who can take the CCAR-P exam? Only people who work at Claude Partner Network organisations can take the exams, registering with a company email on a domain listed on their organisation's partner record (personal email addresses won't work). You must be 18 or over and show a valid, unexpired, government-issued photo ID whose name exactly matches your exam profile.
- How is the CCAR-P exam delivered? Proctored by Pearson VUE: online proctored (OnVUE) or Pearson test center; registration via Anthropic Partner Academy (Claude Partner Network members, 18+, partner email domain)
- How long is the CCAR-P certification valid? Valid for 12 months from the day you earn it. Renew for free before it expires by passing an open-book, non-proctored assessment on Partner Academy; if it lapses, you must pass the full exam again at the full fee.
Checked 2026-11-15 against the official exam guide (Version 1.0, effective July 2026 (initial publication July 2026)). Official exam guide · Official certification FAQ
Retakes, rescheduling and more
- How long should I set aside on exam day? The exam itself is 120 minutes, but Anthropic advises planning for about 135 minutes of total seat time, to cover check-in, instructions and a short survey afterwards. For an online (OnVUE) exam, Pearson VUE also asks you to start check-in 30 minutes before your appointment time, for system checks, ID photos and a room scan, so allow time beyond the exam itself.
- Can I take the exam online or at a test centre? Either. All four exams are delivered by Pearson VUE, and you choose between OnVUE online proctoring and a Pearson test centre at the time you schedule. To switch, cancel and book again. If your government ID is from Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Syria or a restricted region of Ukraine, you can't use OnVUE and must test at a test centre.
- How do I register and book the exam? Since 12 November 2026 you register in Anthropic Partner Academy, go to Pearson VUE through the Partner Academy sign-in, then pay and pick a date at Pearson's checkout, where any partner discount is applied automatically. You need a company email on a domain listed on your organisation's Claude Partner Network record. Personal email addresses won't work.
- What do I need on exam day? A valid, unexpired, government-issued photo ID. The name on it must exactly match your exam profile, or you can't test and you lose the fee. You must be 18 or over, and your age is checked against the ID.
- Is there a discount on the exam fee? It depends on your organisation's Claude Partner Network tier. Registered-tier partners pay full price. Select, Preferred and Global Premier partners get 50% off, applied automatically at Pearson's checkout. Up to and including 31 December 2026, Global Premier partners get 100% off instead, so their exams are free; after that date, the standard 50% discount applies. The discount is locked in when you schedule, so book by 31 December 2026 to keep the 100% discount.
- Why do some sites say Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) costs $99? That was the old CCAR-F price. From 30 June 2026, the same day exam delivery moved to Pearson VUE, the CCAR-F fee went up from $99 to $125 (USD, before any partner discount). Registrations completed before that date paid $99.
- Is the exam open book? No. The exams are closed book: no notes, documentation, translation tools or AI assistants. Only the separate renewal assessment is open book.
- What languages is the exam in? English and Japanese only. You pick the language when you schedule at Pearson. To switch a booked English exam to Japanese, cancel it and book again through Partner Academy. No translation tools, devices or software, including browser translation, are allowed during the exam; if English is your second language, you can ask Pearson for extra time instead.
- What happens if I fail? How do retakes work? You wait 14 days after a first failed attempt, 30 days after a second and 90 days after a third. You can sit the same exam at most four times in any rolling 12-month period. These limits apply to each exam separately, and Anthropic's policies say they reset when an exam moves to a new version. Each retake costs the full exam fee, and any partner discount you get applies to retakes too. Once you pass, you can't retake the exam to raise your score.
- Can I cancel or reschedule the exam? Test-centre exams can be cancelled or rescheduled free up to 48 hours before. For online (OnVUE) exams Anthropic says up to one hour before, but Pearson VUE's FAQ says 48 hours, so make changes at least 48 hours ahead to be safe. The 24-hour cutoff in the July 2026 exam guides is out of date. If you change after the deadline or don't show up, you lose the fee and must pay for a new attempt; the exam guides say the same applies if you arrive after the late-arrival window. If you paid at Pearson's checkout and cancel in time, the refund starts automatically and takes 7 to 10 business days; rescheduling instead keeps your locked price and discount.
- How does renewal work? Each certification is valid for 12 months from the day you earn it. Before it expires, you renew for free by passing an open-book, non-proctored online assessment on Partner Academy, which you can retake as many times as you need. Passing adds 12 months to your current expiry date, not to the day you renew, so renewing early does not shorten your validity. If it lapses, you must pass the full exam again at the full fee. If Anthropic substantially updates an exam, it may require holders to pass the current version of the exam, rather than the renewal assessment, to stay certified; Anthropic decides this case by case. Anthropic hasn't yet said how early the renewal window opens. Certifications earned before 30 June 2026, when validity was 6 months, were automatically extended to 12 months from the date they were originally earned.
- How do I get my certificate or badge? After you pass, Credly, Anthropic's digital badge platform, emails you an invitation to accept your badge. You can then share it on LinkedIn and download a PDF certificate.
- Which certifications count toward Claude Partner Network eligibility? Developer – Foundations (CCDV-F), Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) and Architect – Professional (CCAR-P) count toward Claude Partner Network eligibility. Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F) does not.
- Can I take the exam from any country? Only from the countries and regions Anthropic supports (see its Supported Regions Policy). Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia are excluded, and Pearson VUE has suspended exam delivery to residents of Iran since 8 September 2026.
What the exam covers
D1 Solution Design & Architecture (17% of the exam)
- Turn business problems into Claude solutions
- Design end-to-end architectures (input, processing, output, feedback loops)
- Choose architectural pattern (workflow, agentic, augmented LLM)
- Design multi-agent systems and orchestration
- Apply decomposition to complex problems
- Tie solutions to business value (efficiency, transformation, productivity, cost, performance SLAs)
D2 Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering (13% of the exam)
- Pick Claude models on trade-offs
- Design system prompts, templates and guardrails
- Apply zero-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting
- Optimize context windows and token usage
- Reuse prompts via caching, modular prompts and Skills
D3 Integration (19% of the exam)
- Assess tool/agent configuration for capability bloat
- Analyze authn/authz requirements to find security gaps
- Weigh accuracy-latency trade-offs and justify configuration
- Analyze observability challenges and choose monitoring at scale
- Design RAG pipelines with suitable chunking and indexing
- Match retrieval strategy to data shape and query pattern
- Choose integration mechanism (MCP, API/CLI, agent-to-agent)
- Compare progressive discovery vs monolithic context strategies
D4 Evaluation, Testing & Optimization (16% of the exam)
- Define eval metrics (accuracy, latency, cost, safety, security)
- Build eval datasets and test frameworks with mixed methods
- Run A/B tests and iterate
- Diagnose issues (prompt failure, hallucination, model mismatch)
- Optimize tokens, latency and cost-performance
- Monitor with logging and observability tools
D5 Governance, Safety & Risk Management (14% of the exam)
- Implement guardrails and safety controls
- Identify LLM risks, limitations and failure modes
- Apply human-in-the-loop validation
- Ensure regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP)
- Address bias, fairness and transparency
D6 Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management (14% of the exam)
- Run structured discovery and requirements gathering
- Communicate architectural decisions and trade-offs
- Manage stakeholder feedback and expectations, including SLAs
- Document architectures and give implementation guidance
- Support lifecycle phases (discovery, design, handoff, monitoring, iteration)
D7 Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement (7% of the exam)
- Configure Claude tools/environments for teams (e.g., Claude Code)
- Improve developer workflows with AI-assisted tooling
- Support debugging and operational issue resolution
Sample practice questions
D1
An insurer wants Claude to process supplier invoices. Every invoice goes through the same steps: extract fields, check them against the purchase order, then route to the right approver. Volume is high and auditors want predictable behaviour. Which architecture is the BEST fit?
- An autonomous agent given all ERP tools that plans how to handle each invoice on its own
- A coordinator agent that delegates extraction, matching and routing to three specialist subagents
- A prompt chain with code-based validation gates between extraction, matching and routing
- One large prompt that extracts, matches and routes each invoice in a single model call
D1
A consulting firm wants Claude to investigate competitor markets for clients. Some questions need two searches; others need dozens of follow-ups that depend on what earlier searches reveal. Which property of this problem MOST justifies an agentic design rather than a fixed workflow?
- The steps can't be predicted up front and depend on what earlier searches find
- The firm needs to process many requests per day at a predictable cost per request
- Clients expect the output to look more sophisticated than a standard chatbot reply
- Each research request must follow the same review steps defined by firm policy
D1
An HR team wants an assistant that answers employee questions from regional policy handbooks that total several thousand pages and change weekly. An engineer proposes a five-agent system with a planner, retriever, writer, checker and editor. No evals exist yet. What should the architect recommend FIRST?
- Build the five-agent design now but cap each agent at three turns to keep spending under control
- Start with one Claude call augmented with retrieval; add steps only if evals show gaps
- Fine-tune a separate model on the handbook so that retrieval is not needed to answer questions
- Place every handbook in full in each request and ask Claude to answer directly from them