AI-900 Retired: Azure AI Fundamentals Is Now AI-901

Microsoft retired exam AI-900 on June 30, 2026, at 11:59 PM Central Standard Time, and replaced it with AI-901. The certification itself did not change name: it is still Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals. What changed is the exam you have to sit to earn it. The Microsoft Learn certification page now lists AI-901 as the only required exam, and the old AI-900 exam page carries a warning reading: "The certification requirements have changed. The AI-900 exam was retired on June 30, 2026, and has been replaced by AI-901. To earn this certification, candidates must now pass AI-901." This affects people who had not passed AI-900 by that date. It does not affect people who had.

Does this affect you?

The boundary is your test date, not your registration date, and not the date you started studying. AI-900 stopped being delivered after June 30, 2026, so there is no "I registered before the cutoff" grace period — an appointment could not be sat after the retirement.

• You passed AI-900 on or before June 30, 2026 — Not affected. You hold Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals. You do not need to take AI-901, and you do not need to do anything at all. Microsoft's footnote on the exam page is explicit: "Complete this exam before the retirement date to ensure it is applied toward your certification."
• You are studying now and have not tested — Affected. AI-901 is your only option. Check whether the material you bought is AI-900 material before you spend more hours in it.
• You booked AI-900 but never sat it — Affected. Contact Microsoft Credentials support about the voucher or booking; the exam itself is gone.
• You failed AI-900 and planned a retake — Affected. There is no AI-900 retake. Your retake is AI-901, against a different skills outline.
• You are taking the exam in a language other than English — Microsoft updates English first and localized versions "approximately eight weeks after." AI-901's English objectives are dated April 15, 2026, so that window has closed as of August 2026, but it is worth confirming on the exam page before you book.
• You are working toward AI-102, Azure Data Scientist, or another role-based cert — Not affected. AI-900 was never a prerequisite for any of them, so its retirement does not block or reset any path you were on.

AI-900 vs. AI-901: what actually moved

Where the old domains went

What to actually do differently when studying

Microsoft has not said AI-901 is harder or easier than AI-900, and neither should anyone else. But it is measurably different in kind, and the difference is not subtle: on AI-900, every objective began with "describe" or "identify." On AI-901, the largest domain begins with "implement," and it is worth 55–60% of the exam. Adjust accordingly.

• Get into the Foundry portal. More than half the exam is scoped to it. Deploy a model, open the playground, write a system prompt, create a single agent and test it. Reading about this is not the same as doing it, and the objectives are phrased as tasks.
• Learn enough Python to read a client app. The audience profile now names "Python coding syntax and programming techniques." You do not need to be a developer, but "create a lightweight chat client application by using the Foundry SDK" is not a concept question. This is the single biggest change for non-technical candidates, who AI-900 explicitly welcomed.
• Stop drilling classic ML. Regression versus classification versus clustering, features and labels, training and validation splits, AutoML, the Transformer architecture — all of it was 15–20% of AI-900 and none of it appears in the AI-901 outline. If your notes are heavy here, that time is now unrecoverable.
• Learn Azure Content Understanding. It has its own four-bullet sub-section covering documents, forms, images, audio, and video. There was no equivalent on AI-900.
• Relearn the product names. "Azure AI Foundry" is written as Microsoft Foundry throughout the AI-901 outline, and Speech and Content Understanding are presented as Foundry Tools rather than standalone Azure AI services. Expect the new naming in the question stems.
• Be careful with the official study guide's link table. The "Find documentation" section of the AI-901 study guide still points to Anomaly Detector, Language Understanding (LUIS), and Azure Bot Service — none of which appear anywhere in the AI-901 objectives. It appears to have been carried over from AI-900. Study the objectives list, not that table.
• Expect thin third-party material for now. Microsoft's own certification page currently says "Learning paths or modules are not yet available for this certification," and the instructor-led AI-901T00 course is the main first-party option besides the practice assessment on AI Skills Navigator. Most video courses, books, and question banks you will find in search results are still AI-900 — partly because Microsoft has set the AI-900 page to noindex rather than removing it, so older third-party pages still outrank the notice. Check the exam code on the cover before you buy anything.

What did not change

This is the useful half of the diff, because it tells you which of your existing notes are still worth keeping.

• The certification. Same name, same badge, same Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals credential. Nothing on your resume or LinkedIn needs editing.
• The passing score. 700, scaled, same as before, same as every Microsoft exam.
• Responsible AI. All six principles — fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, accountability — appear in AI-901 with wording identical to AI-900. If you already studied this section, you are done with it.
• Core AI workload concepts. Sentiment analysis, entity detection, keyword extraction, summarization, speech recognition and synthesis, image classification concepts — the vocabulary carried over.
• No prerequisites. AI-901 requires no other exam, and like AI-900 it is not a prerequisite for AI-102 or any role-based certification.
• Languages. The same 13 languages are offered, and the extra-30-minutes accommodation for non-native-language candidates still applies.
• Fundamentals certifications still do not expire. Microsoft's renewal page states plainly: "Fundamentals certifications do not expire." Only associate, expert, and specialty certifications renew annually.

If you are in the group that now has to sit AI-901, the fastest way to find out which of your AI-900 notes still hold is to answer questions written against the current two-domain outline rather than the retired five-domain one — you can start with our free Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals practice test.