Quick answer
Yes, Claude Academy is free. You can browse Anthropic's courses at academy.claude.com without signing in, and a free personal Claude account saves your progress and earns completion badges. Some courses need a paid Claude plan to practise. Certification exams are separate: they cost $99 to $175 and are only for Claude Partner Network organisations. Checked 9 November 2026.
Anthropic runs its courses through Claude Academy, which it describes as free courses, tutorials and use cases from its education team. Many of the same courses are still listed on Anthropic's course site on Skilljar, where individual course pages are marked FREE and several list a certificate of completion.
For most people the right starting point is Claude 101 (everyday work with Claude) or AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations (how to work with any AI well). If you are a developer, Anthropic's API, Claude Code and Model Context Protocol courses are the authoritative material and you should take those rather than anyone else's. Anthropic also offers paid, exam-based certifications, which are a separate thing from the free courses.
Checked against Anthropic's own pages on 22 October 2026: the Claude Academy FAQ, the Claude Academy catalogue, Anthropic Courses on Skilljar, the certification FAQ and the Claude Academy launch post. Offers change, so confirm the current details before you enrol.
A note on independence before we go further: LearnWithZavi is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with Anthropic. We teach Claude as independent educators. Anthropic's material is the authority on its own products.
What is Claude Academy?
Anthropic announced Claude Academy on 20 August 2026 in a post on its teaching and learning approach. The post says you can reach it at academy.claude.com or from the Learn more tab in your Claude profile menu, that it is organised around problems you need to solve with AI, and that it tracks course completion and badges.
The Academy FAQ answers the money question directly. It says Claude Academy is free, that you can browse the catalogue without signing in at all, and that signing in with a free Claude account is what saves your progress and lets you earn completion badges. It also says you do not need a paid plan or a work account; a personal Claude account works.
The Academy has two broad halves. One teaches AI fluency, meaning how to work with AI systems in general, and is not tied to any product. The other goes deeper on Claude itself: the Claude app, Cowork, Claude Code, Claude Tag and the developer platform.
There are two places you may see the courses, and the details differ slightly:
- On academy.claude.com, the Claude 101 page asks for a Claude account on any plan, including Free, and says you sign in to save progress. Finishing earns a completion badge. This is now Anthropic's main home for learning.
- On anthropic.skilljar.com, the Claude 101 page is marked FREE, says you do not need an Anthropic account to access the content, and lists a certificate of completion.
If you started courses on Skilljar, the Academy FAQ says your progress does not carry over automatically, but you can import it when the email on your Claude account matches your Skilljar email. Anything you earned on Skilljar stays valid. People learning through Anthropic's partner programme stay on Skilljar for now.
Anthropic has merged Claude Cowork and chat into one Claude app. Its announcement of 16 September 2026 says the change is rolling out to Pro and Max plans first, with Team and Free plans to follow.
Anthropic's free Claude courses at a glance
Lesson counts, durations and badges come from each course's page in the Claude Academy catalogue. Durations are Anthropic's estimates.
| Course | Provider | What it covers | How technical | Free or paid | Certificate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude 101 | Anthropic | Everyday work: prompting, projects, artifacts, skills, connectors. 13 lessons, 2.5 hours | Non-technical | Free | Completion badge on the Academy; certificate of completion listed on Skilljar |
| AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations | Anthropic, with academic co-authors | The 4D framework: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. 14 lessons, 4 hours | Non-technical | Free | Completion badge on the Academy; certificate of completion after a final assessment on Skilljar |
| AI capabilities and limitations | Anthropic | What large language models can and cannot do. 13 lessons, 3.5 hours | Non-technical | Free | Completion badge |
| Introduction to Claude Cowork | Anthropic | Delegating multi-step work to Claude on your files and apps. 14 lessons, 2.5 hours | Non-technical, but needs a paid Claude plan | Course free | Completion badge |
| AI Fluency for small businesses, nonprofits, students, educators and creative work | Anthropic | The 4D framework applied to a specific audience. 1.5 to 5 hours each | Non-technical | Free | Completion badge |
| Claude Code 101 | Anthropic | Installing and using Claude Code in a development workflow. 12 lessons, 1.5 hours | Developer | Course free; needs a paid plan or API key | Completion badge |
| Building with the Claude API | Anthropic | The API end to end, including tools, RAG, MCP and agents. 67 lessons, 9 hours | Developer, requires Python | Free; needs an API key | Completion badge |
| Introduction to Model Context Protocol | Anthropic | Building MCP servers and clients in Python. 10 lessons, 1 hour | Developer | Free; needs an API key for later lessons | Completion badge |
| Introduction to agent skills; Introduction to subagents | Anthropic | Skills in Claude Code, and splitting work across subagents. 45 minutes to 1 hour each | Developer | Free | No quiz or badge listed |
Badges come from passing quizzes, so the two short courses in the last row do not earn one.
Do you need a paid Claude plan?
Not to take the courses. Every course in the table is free to open and work through, and the FAQ says a free Claude account is enough to save progress and earn badges. What differs is whether you can practise what a course teaches on the Free plan.
- Works on the Free plan: Claude 101 lists a Claude account on any plan, including Free. Its page notes that a few features it covers need a paid plan to try hands-on: Cowork and Research (Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise) and Enterprise Search (Team and Enterprise). The AI Fluency courses are about how you work with AI, so any chatbot will do for the exercises.
- Needs a paid plan to practise: Introduction to Claude Cowork lists a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise), plus the desktop app for the lessons that work on folders on your computer. Claude Code 101 lists a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise account, or an API key.
- Needs an API key: the developer courses on the API and Model Context Protocol expect you to call Claude from code, which means an Anthropic API key and paying for what you use.
Not sure a paid plan is worth it? Take Claude 101 on the Free plan first. Our comparison of ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini can also help you decide which tool to pay for, if any.
Which Anthropic course should you start with?
If you use Claude, or want to, for ordinary work: take Claude 101. Anthropic pitches it at anyone getting started with Claude at work, and it runs from your first message through projects, artifacts, skills and connected tools. If prompting itself is new to you, our explainer on what prompt engineering is is a useful ten-minute primer before you start.
If you want to be better with AI in general, whichever tool you use: take AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations. It was developed with Prof. Joseph Feller of University College Cork and Prof. Rick Dakan of Ringling College of Art and Design, and it is one of the better free treatments of how to delegate to AI and judge what comes back.
If you run a small business, a charity, or teach: the audience-specific AI Fluency courses are a better fit than the general one, because the examples will look like your week.
If you use Cowork: Introduction to Claude Cowork is the official walkthrough, on a paid plan.
If you are a developer: go straight to Anthropic. Claude Code 101 assumes basic familiarity with a code editor and the command line, and Building with the Claude API lists proficiency in Python and basic JSON. For API, Claude Code, MCP and agent-building topics, Anthropic's courses are the better choice than ours, full stop. We do not teach the API. If you are not a programmer but want to build small tools with AI anyway, read AI coding for non-programmers first, so you know what you are getting into.
Anthropic also worked with DeepLearning.AI on short courses such as Claude Code: A Highly Agentic Coding Assistant, taught by Anthropic's Elie Schoppik. That one is intermediate level and recommends familiarity with Python and Git. Our guide to whether DeepLearning.AI courses are free explains how access works there.
Free completion badge vs paid Claude certification
These are easy to confuse, and they are not the same.
The free courses end in a completion badge on Claude Academy, and some Skilljar pages list a certificate of completion. According to the Academy FAQ, badges are earned by passing a course's quizzes (every lesson quiz, plus the final assessment where there is one), not just by reading the lessons. Retakes are unlimited, badges do not expire, and you can download one as a PDF, add it to LinkedIn or share its public verification link. These record that you finished a course. If a certificate is what you are after, our round-up of free AI courses with certificates compares the options from other providers too.
The certifications are exams. In a July 2026 post, Anthropic set out four role-based certifications. The Academy FAQ says they are a separate paid, proctored programme: the exams are delivered by Pearson, the credential is issued through Credly, and the programme is only available to Anthropic partners. The certification FAQ adds that registration needs a partner email address on a recognised company domain, so personal email addresses will not work.
| Certification | Exam fee (USD) |
|---|---|
| Claude Certified Associate: Foundations | $99 |
| Claude Certified Developer: Foundations | $125 |
| Claude Certified Architect: Foundations | $125 |
| Claude Certified Architect: Professional | $175 |
Fees are from Anthropic's certification FAQ, in US dollars before any partner discount. The FAQ says the Architect: Foundations exam rose from $99 to $125 on 30 June 2026, so older articles may show the lower price. It also says Registered-tier partners pay full price, Select, Preferred and Global Premier partners get 50% off, and Global Premier partners get the exams free until 31 December 2026.
So if you do not work at a partner firm, the certifications are not open to you yet, and the free completion badge is what you can earn. We wrote a longer guide to Claude Certified Architect Foundations if you are at a partner organisation and weighing that one up.
How to start Claude Academy, step by step
- Open academy.claude.com. You can browse everything without signing in. Use Get started to answer a couple of questions about what you want to learn, or Browse all resources to see the full catalogue.
- Sign in with a free Claude account. Choose Sign in, approve access at claude.ai, and you are sent back to the Academy. If you do not have a Claude account yet, create a free one at claude.ai first. Course pages offer a Sign in to save progress button, because progress and badges are only saved when you are signed in.
- Pick Claude 101 or AI Fluency. Open Claude 101 if you want to use Claude at work, or AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations if you want skills that carry across tools. Choose Start course.
- Pass the quizzes. Work through the lessons, then pass every quiz the course has. There is no retake limit, and if you fail one you only retake that quiz.
- Download the badge. The badge is issued as soon as you pass the last required quiz. Open it from your Academy dashboard to download a PDF, add it to LinkedIn or copy its verification link.
Where LearnWithZavi fits
LearnWithZavi is a free, independent site for people who want to use AI at work without learning to code. There is no signup and no payment stage. Finish a course and you can print a free certificate of completion. It is not accredited, and it is not an Anthropic credential.
Our Claude lessons are practical and task-first rather than product tours. They assume you want a result by the end of the lesson, not a map of every feature. If that is what you are after, these are worth a look alongside Anthropic's own material:
- Claude Cowork: handing multi-step tasks to Claude on your own files. Read what Claude Cowork is first if the name is new.
- Claude Skills: what a skill is, when one is worth making, and how to write your first. Background in what Claude Skills are.
- Automate Your Week with Claude: using Projects so you stop repeating yourself, and setting up recurring tasks that run on a schedule.
- Introduction to AI Agents: what an agent is, how it differs from a chatbot, and where agents still fall over.
All of them are gathered in our Claude courses hub, with related paths in agentic AI, courses that need no coding and free courses with a certificate. If you would rather start wider than Claude, browse our free AI courses for beginners.
A fair way to combine them: take Anthropic's Claude 101 for the official picture of the product, then use our lessons to practise on real work. If you are still deciding which tool to learn at all, ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini will help, and how to choose a free AI course covers the bigger question of which kind of course you need.