For engineers deciding whether to sit the Claude architect exam

CCAR-F exam guide v1.0: what changed, and which figures are now wrong

The current figures, and where each one comes from

Everything below is published by Anthropic or by Pearson VUE on a page you can open without a login, without a Partner Network account, and without the exam guide PDF. That is deliberate: the most common way a prep page goes wrong is that its figures came from a summary of a summary, and by the time a number has been copied three times nobody can tell you which document it came from. Every figure here is traceable to a page you can open in the next thirty seconds, which is also how you check us.

The five domains and their weights

Anthropic publishes the domain split on the same exam page. These are exact percentages, not approximations, and the gap between the largest and the smallest is wide enough to plan around.

D1 is worth half as much again as D5. On a 60-question paper that is roughly 16 questions against 9 — so a blind spot in agentic design costs you materially more than one in context management, and a study plan that treats the five domains as equal is spending its time in the wrong place. The per-domain breakdown sits in our AI certification exam guide; the exam overview is on the Anthropic certification page.

What actually changed in July 2026

Three changes, and the first is the one that hurts candidates most.

The official practice exam is gone. Material written before July 2026 points at a 60-question practice exam offered through Anthropic's learning platform. It is not there today: the Partner Academy catalogue lists no practice exam for this credential, and Pearson VUE's Anthropic pages offer none either — checked on both, 14 Aug 2026. If your study plan was built around sitting the official practice paper first, that step no longer exists, and every practice bank you will find instead is third-party and unverified against the current guide.

Delivery and scheduling moved to Pearson VUE. You buy the exam through Anthropic's Partner Academy — the credential is obtained through the Claude Partner Network, so access to registration is not open to everyone — and then schedule with Pearson, online-proctored or at a test centre, with a 30-minute check-in, an ID photo and a 360° room scan on exam day. That check-in is not a formality: budget the time, because the published exam length is 120 minutes but the seat time Anthropic quotes is about 135.

The commercial terms are now published and stable. $125 per attempt, 12-month validity, four attempts a year with a widening cooldown between them. That is what Anthropic's own page and Pearson VUE say today, and it is not what a lot of the surviving prep pages say.

Five figures still circulating that are wrong today

These are all live on prep pages right now. We are not naming the properties, because the point is not who got it wrong — several of them are otherwise useful, and any of them may have corrected it by the time you read this. The point is that you will meet these numbers, and each one leads you somewhere specific and bad.

The individual corrections matter less than what they have in common, which is not a single bad source: it is the absence of re-checking. None of these pages says when it was last verified, so none of them can tell you whether its figures survived the July changes — and in a market where the mechanics moved this year, a page that cannot answer that question is a page you have to verify yourself before you act on it.

Check any of this yourself, in about two minutes

Do not take our numbers on trust either. Two public pages settle almost every question, and neither needs an account:

• Anthropic's Partner Academy exam page carries the exam facts card — questions, length, price, validity, delivery — the five domains with their weights, and the format card with the passing score. This is the publisher's own page, so it outranks every summary of it, including ours.
• Pearson VUE's Anthropic page carries the four exam codes (CCAR-F, CCAR-P, CCAO-F, CCDV-F), the registration path and the retake ladder, and its OnVUE page covers what online proctoring requires on the day.

For the programme in context, Anthropic's announcement of the four role-based certifications is the primary source on what each credential is for and who it targets.

If a prep page disagrees with those two pages, the prep page is wrong. If it agrees but carries no date, it is right by luck until the next revision.

What this changes about how you prepare

Losing the official practice exam is a bigger deal than the corrected numbers, and it is under-discussed because it is an absence rather than a change — nothing on any page says “the thing you were looking for is gone”.

What it removes is the one calibration signal that came from the exam's own authors. A third-party bank can tell you whether you know the material; only a first-party paper could tell you whether you know it the way the exam asks about it, which for a scenario-based paper is most of the difficulty. With that gone, the honest advice is to stop treating any practice score as a predictor of your scaled score, and to use practice questions for what they still do well: finding the domains where your reasoning breaks down, then going back to the primary documentation for those.

Two practical consequences. First, weight your preparation by the published blueprint rather than by whichever bank you happen to be working through — the banks are not weighted to 27/18/20/20/15 and have no obligation to be. Second, treat the retake ladder as part of the plan rather than as failure insurance: a first attempt taken 14 days earlier than you feel ready is a legitimate calibration strategy now that it costs a fortnight rather than the whole opportunity, and $125.

Where we would push back on ourselves: none of this makes the exam easy to prepare for from public material alone, and we are not going to claim it does. The public pages give you the mechanics and the blueprint. They do not give you the task-level detail, which is exactly why the outdated third-party pages keep getting traffic — they are filling a real gap, badly.

How we keep this page true

This page carries a verification date in the byline, and that date means something narrow and specific: the public sources above were opened and read on that day. It does not mean the page was edited that day, and it does not mean a script checked it — a date that quietly means “last touched” is how pages end up looking fresh while carrying launch-era figures. Our Anthropic certification page carries the same question count, time limit, pass mark, weights and fee; our exam guide carries the same blueprint.

When Anthropic revises the guide again, this page will be wrong until we re-read the sources — and the date in the byline is what will tell you that, by getting old in plain sight. A corrections page with no date would be doing exactly what it criticises.

If you find a figure here that no longer matches the publisher's page, tell us and we will fix it and re-date it. Corrections: hello@aiarch.dev.