Exam guide·14 min read·12 March 2026

The Claude Certified Architect exam: every domain, every task statement, scored by difficulty

A definitive, opinionated walk-through of all five exam domains and 30 task statements, with our internal difficulty rating and the concepts that catch most people out.

The Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam is structured around five domains, thirty task statements, and six scenario-based question groups. Anthropic publishes the headline structure but stops short of telling you which task statements quietly carry most of the marks. After running several thousand learner sessions through the question bank, we have a clear view of where the difficulty actually sits, and it is not where the official guide hints.

Domain 1 (Agentic Architecture) and Domain 4 (Evaluation) are where most candidates lose points. The agentic loop, stop_reason handling and subagent isolation alone account for roughly a quarter of the questions in our bank, and they are also the concepts learners most consistently misjudge their own mastery on. If you are prioritising study time, treat these two domains as the load-bearing wall of the exam.

Below we go domain by domain, task statement by task statement, with our difficulty rating (1 to 5), the concept that most learners trip on, and the kind of scenario you can expect. Use this as a planning document before you start, and again as a checklist in the final week before you sit.