AIP-C01 Exam Guide 2026: AWS GenAI Developer Pro

This AIP-C01 exam guide covers the AWS Professional-level exam for generative AI developers. According to the AWS exam guide, it has 75 questions, 180 minutes of exam time and five weighted domains.

The exam is about putting generative AI into production, not training models. This guide covers what it measures, who it suits, and how to plan four weeks of preparation.

What is the AIP-C01 exam?

AIP-C01 is the AWS Certified Generative AI Developer - Professional exam. According to AWS, it validates your ability to integrate foundation models into applications and business workflows.

A foundation model is a large pre-trained AI model that you adapt to many tasks through prompts, retrieval or configuration rather than training from scratch. On AWS, the certification page names Amazon Bedrock as the example service.

AWS lists the tasks the exam validates:

• designing solutions with vector stores, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), knowledge bases and other GenAI architectures;
• applying prompt engineering and management techniques;
• implementing agentic AI solutions;
• optimizing applications for cost, performance and business value;
• implementing security, governance and Responsible AI practices;
• troubleshooting, monitoring and evaluating applications and foundation models.

What domains does AIP-C01 cover?

The exam covers five domains, and foundation model integration carries the most weight at 31% of scored content. AWS publishes these weights in the exam guide.

Content domain	Weight
Domain 1: Foundation Model Integration, Data Management, and Compliance	31%
Domain 2: Implementation and Integration	26%
Domain 3: AI Safety, Security, and Governance	20%
Domain 4: Operational Efficiency and Optimization for GenAI Applications	12%
Domain 5: Testing, Validation, and Troubleshooting	11%

The first two domains make up more than half of the scored content. A candidate who is strong on integration and weak on governance can still lose a large share of points.

What is out of scope for AIP-C01?

AWS lists model development and training, advanced ML techniques, and data engineering and feature engineering as out of scope. The list is not exhaustive.

That matters for your study time. You are tested on using models well in production, not on building them.

Who is AIP-C01 for, and who is it not for?

AIP-C01 suits developers who already ship applications on AWS and have started adding generative AI. AWS describes the target candidate as having two or more years of production experience and one year with GenAI solutions.

It is a good fit for:

• application developers who integrate foundation models into existing services;
• cloud engineers who deploy, secure and monitor GenAI workloads;
• ML or data engineers who now own the production side of GenAI.

It is a weaker fit for:

• people new to AWS, who may want an associate-level exam first;
• readers on the Azure side, who may prefer our guide on how AI-103 replaces AI-102.

How should you use this AIP-C01 exam guide? A 4-week plan

Plan around the weights: spend the most hands-on time on integration and implementation. This plan assumes about eight hours a week.

1. Week 1: Domain 1. Compare foundation models for a use case, build a retrieval pipeline over your own documents, and note the data privacy and compliance choices you made.
2. Week 2: Domain 2. Call a model from application code, manage prompts as versioned assets, and build a small agent that calls a tool. Wire the pieces into a workflow.
3. Week 3: Domains 3 and 4. Add safety controls, least-privilege access and encryption. Then compare options for cost and latency, and note which trade-off each one makes.
4. Week 4: Domain 5 and timed practice. Evaluate model output, set up monitoring and troubleshoot a failing request. Then sit full timed practice tests, review every miss by domain, and repeat.

Mixed, spaced review beats rereading, as our post on how to study for a technical exam explains.

How does AIP-C01 scoring work?

AIP-C01 is scored on a scaled range of 100-1,000, and the minimum passing score is 750. AWS says scaled scoring helps equate scores across exam forms of slightly different difficulty.

The exam uses a compensatory model. A weak domain can be offset by a strong one, because you need to pass only the overall exam.

There are two question types. Multiple choice has one correct response and three distractors. Multiple response has two or more correct responses out of five or more options, and you must select all of them to receive credit.

How is AIP-C01 delivered?

You can take the exam at a Pearson VUE testing center or as an online proctored exam. AWS lists English, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese as the languages offered.

The cost is 300 USD, according to the AWS certification page. AWS points to its exam pricing page for additional cost information, including foreign exchange rates.

Is AIP-C01 hard?

It is demanding because it is a Professional-level exam with 75 questions in 180 minutes, so both reading stamina and pace matter. Multiple-response questions give no partial credit.

The breadth is the other challenge. One scenario can touch retrieval, security and cost together, so study the trade-offs between options rather than one service at a time.

How do you know you are ready to book?

You are ready when you can walk through each domain without notes and explain why you would choose one design over another. Use AWS’s free practice question set and pretest first for the question style.

Then sit at least two full timed AIP-C01 practice tests and look at your score by domain, not only the total. If one domain trails, spend another week building before you book.

Before you schedule, recheck the AIP-C01 certification page and the exam guide it links to for the current domains and weights.

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