Is AI-900 Retired? Yes, on June 30, 2026 (And AI-901 Is Nothing Like It)

Yes. AI-900 retired on June 30, 2026. Microsoft's Azure AI Fundamentals certification page now lists only one exam, AI-901, and AI-900 is gone from it. The certification name did not change: you still earn Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals. Only the exam underneath was swapped. But calling AI-901 a refresh badly undersells it. AI-900 had five domains; AI-901 has two. The phrase "machine learning" appears 13 times in AI-900's skills outline and zero times in AI-901's. And a fundamentals exam that never once asked you to build anything now expects you to deploy a model and ship an agent.

If you already passed AI-900, you keep the certification and there is nothing you need to do. Microsoft's renewal policy applies to associate, expert and specialty certifications, which expire annually. Fundamentals certifications are not on that list. Your credential does not lapse and there is no renewal assessment to chase.

If you were about to take AI-900, stop, and read the rest of this. The study material you were about to buy is for an exam that no longer exists, and roughly a fifth of it covers content that has been deleted outright.

Five domains became two

This is the change that reshapes everything else. AI-901's entire structure is different.

AI-901's two domains are "Identify AI concepts and capabilities" at 40 to 45 percent, and "Implement AI solutions by using Microsoft Foundry" at 55 to 60 percent. Stop on that second one. The majority of a Microsoft fundamentals exam is now a single product.

Machine learning is not on the exam anymore

Run the check yourself. Open Microsoft's AI-901 study guide, press Ctrl+F, search for "machine learning." Zero results. Do the same on the AI-900 guide and you get 13.

The whole "Describe fundamental principles of machine learning on Azure" domain is gone: regression, classification, clustering, training and validation datasets, Azure Machine Learning studio, Automated ML. The word "dataset" itself appears twice in AI-900's outline and zero times in AI-901's.

The content did not evaporate. It moved up a level, to AI-300, the associate-level exam that replaced DP-100. What Microsoft appears to have decided is that a beginner in 2026 does not need to know what k-means clustering is before they need to know what an agent is. You can argue with that judgment, but you cannot argue with what is on the exam.

This is where most AI-901 candidates now waste their time. They buy an AI-900 course, or a free question bank scraped from one, and spend a fifth of their study hours drilling regression and Automated ML questions that cannot appear on the exam they booked.

It is no longer a describe-only exam

AI-900 had a reputation, and it was earned: you could pass it in a weekend without ever opening the Azure portal. Every one of its five domains literally began with the word "Describe." It was a vocabulary test.

We counted the verbs in both official outlines. The shift is not subtle.

Zero instances of create, build or implement across the whole of AI-900. Fifteen across AI-901. The actual bullets now read: "Create effective system and user prompts for generative AI models." "Deploy a model and interact with it in the Foundry portal." "Create a lightweight chat client application by using the Foundry SDK." "Create and test a single-agent solution in the Foundry portal."

That is a fundamentals exam asking you to ship a working agent. If your study plan was a video course and a glossary, which was genuinely sufficient for AI-900, it is not sufficient now. You need portal time.

What is still the same

Three things survived the rewrite, and they are worth knowing because they are the stable ground.

Responsible AI, completely intact. All six principles are still examined: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability. This is the most reliably examinable content on the paper precisely because it does not change when Microsoft renames a product. Learn it cold.

The price. $99 in the United States, confirmed in Microsoft's own exam pricing feed, unchanged from AI-900.

The pass mark. 700 out of 1000. Microsoft notes that because it is a scaled score, it may not equal 70 percent of the points. And as always, Microsoft publishes no question count and no pass rate, for this exam or any other. Its only public guidance is that most exams "typically contain between 40-60 questions." Any site quoting you an exact figure made it up.

Is AI-901 harder than AI-900?

More hands-on, and narrower. Those pull in opposite directions.

Narrower helps you: there is simply less surface area to memorize when five domains collapse into two, and the deleted machine learning material was the part most non-technical candidates found genuinely alien. Hands-on hurts you: you cannot bluff "create and test a single-agent solution in the Foundry portal" from a slide deck.

The net effect, for most people, is that AI-901 takes more hours than AI-900 did but rewards a different kind of preparation. Time in the portal beats time with a highlighter. Someone who has actually deployed a model in Foundry and pointed a chat client at it will find the exam mostly common sense. Someone who has read about it will find it slippery.

How to study for an exam with no official practice bank

Microsoft has not released a practice assessment for AI-901 yet, and its stated policy is that these usually arrive within 8 weeks of an exam going generally available. So there is currently no official bank, which means every AI-901 question set you can find online was either written from the published outline (fine, if honest about it) or scraped from AI-900 (actively harmful, for all the reasons above).

The approach that works is to generate questions from current material: Microsoft's Foundry documentation, the AI-901 study guide itself, and the notes you take while actually clicking through the portal. That material is current by definition and uses the vocabulary the exam uses. You can turn your own study notes into practice questions with an answer key in a couple of minutes, which also has the useful property of testing whether your notes are any good.

If you are the person responsible for getting a whole team through this, the certification is a small part of the problem and the tracking is the rest of it. Teams that are rolling AI literacy out at scale usually end up wanting something that can train, onboard and certify the whole company in one place rather than chasing individual exam vouchers through a spreadsheet.

The rest of the retirement wave

AI-900 was not a one-off. It is one of six certifications Microsoft is retiring in its Cloud and AI rebrand, and three of those dates have already passed.

Where to go next

AI-901 is the entry point. The natural step after it is AI-103, the associate exam for building AI apps and agents, which replaced AI-102. If your interest is the machine learning material that AI-901 dropped, that now lives on AI-300. If you want the other fundamentals exam, the one that is not retiring, that is AZ-900.

To start drilling the current exam, the AI-901 practice test generator covers both domains, weights Foundry the way the exam does, and leaves out the machine learning content that is no longer on it.