The short answer
Current as of 11 August 2026. OpenAI Academy offers three free AI Foundations courses. Finish them and you receive a digital badge issued through Credly.
That badge is not the proctored OpenAI certification that has been separately announced. The two get conflated constantly, largely because the badge looks like the sort of thing a certification produces.
What the badge does represent is less settled than most pages suggest, and it is worth being straight about that. Some published descriptions present AI Foundations as free courses ending in a completion badge, which records that you worked through the material. Others describe it as an assessed credential earned by completing scenario-based tasks inside ChatGPT, with ETS providing the psychometric design. Those may be the same programme described at different levels of rigour, or it may have changed shape during the pilots. Either way it is not a proctored exam, and OpenAI has published nothing that settles the question. The section below on reading the badge criteria is how you find out what your specific badge was awarded for.
This post explains what the courses are, what the badge represents, how to describe it accurately when you put it on a CV or a LinkedIn profile, and where it sits relative to the exam that has been announced.
A note on independence: OAI Prep is an independent practice platform. We are not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by OpenAI, Inc. OpenAI and ChatGPT are trademarks of OpenAI, Inc.
What OpenAI Academy is
OpenAI Academy is OpenAI's own learning platform. The AI Foundations track sits within it as three free courses, taken online and at your own pace, aimed at people who want to use AI capably in their work. Completing all three earns the badge.
We have deliberately not reproduced a lesson-by-lesson syllabus here. Learning catalogues get reorganised, renamed and extended, and a summary written today could describe something different from what you find when you arrive. The current course list and lesson contents are published by OpenAI Academy itself, and that is the copy to read before you enrol. The rest of this post covers the part that causes confusion, which is the credential at the end.
What the badge is
The badge is issued through Credly, a digital badging platform. Once it is issued you get a badge page with a verifiable link that anyone can open to see who issued it, who earned it, when, and on what basis. You can share that link, add it to LinkedIn, or embed it in an email signature.
The criteria section of a badge page is the part that matters, because that is where the issuer states what the badge was awarded for. For a completion badge, the criteria describe finishing a course. For an assessment-based credential, the criteria describe passing an exam to a defined standard. Anyone checking your badge can read that section, so the badge itself is transparent about what it represents.
Credly is the same platform reported as the badging route for the announced proctored exam, under Credly by Pearson. Two credentials can be issued through the same platform and represent quite different things, which is one more reason the criteria line is worth reading.
Completion badge and certification: the difference
| Aspect | Completion badge | Professional certification |
|---|---|---|
| What it evidences | You completed the learning | You met a defined standard under assessment |
| How it is earned | Working through the material | Passing an exam, usually proctored |
| Can you fail? | No | Yes |
| Is there a passing score? | No | Yes, set through a formal process |
| Typical cost | Often free | Usually a fee per attempt |
| Expiry | Usually none | Often time-limited with renewal |
Neither column is superior in general. They answer different questions. A completion badge answers "has this person been through structured training on the subject?", and a certification answers "has this person's competence been measured against a standard?".
The table describes the two categories rather than telling you which one AI Foundations falls into, because as noted above that is not settled publicly. A scenario-based assessment sits somewhere between the columns: there is real work to produce and it can be judged, without the controlled conditions of a proctored exam. Read your own badge criteria to see which description applies to it.
For a hiring manager, the completion badge is a reasonable signal of interest and initiative, particularly early on when a field has few established credentials. It carries less weight than an assessed qualification because nothing about it distinguishes the person who absorbed the material from the person who left the video running.
Describing it accurately
If you hold the badge, put it on your profile. It is a real, verifiable record issued by OpenAI Academy. Describe it as what it is.
- Accurate: "OpenAI Academy AI Foundations (completion badge, 2026)".
- Accurate: "Completed OpenAI Academy's AI Foundations courses".
- Not accurate: "OpenAI Certified".
- Not accurate: "OpenAI Certification, 2026".
The last two describe a credential that does not currently exist in a form anyone outside the employer pilots can obtain, and an interviewer who follows the badge link will see the criteria say "completion". Claiming a certification you do not hold is a bad trade for a line on a CV.
Who the courses suit
The AI Foundations track is aimed at general workplace use rather than at engineering. It suits you if:
- You use ChatGPT or a similar assistant at work and picked it up by trial and error, so you have gaps you cannot see.
- You are in operations, marketing, project management, HR, learning and development, education, customer support or consulting, and AI has arrived in your workflow without any training attached.
- You are responsible for how a team uses AI and want a shared baseline everyone can complete.
- You expect to sit an AI certification eventually and want to start building the underlying skills while the credentials settle down.
They are free and self-paced, so finding out whether they suit you costs nothing beyond the time you give them.
How this relates to the announced exam
A separate proctored certification exam has been announced. As of 11 August 2026 it is not open for public registration, and reporting describes it as being in psychometric development with ETS while employer pilots run at organisations including Walmart, John Deere, Lowe's, BCG and Accenture.
OpenAI has not published exam domains, weightings, question count, duration, passing score, proctoring arrangements, a fee or a launch date. We have seen nothing stating that the AI Foundations courses are a prerequisite for that exam, and nothing describing how the two relate. Our full status write-up is in What is the OpenAI certification? What has been announced so far, which we keep current as things change.
What to do while you wait
The useful thing about a vacuum in credentials is that the underlying skills are not in doubt. Assessments of workplace AI use that do have published blueprints consistently test the same competencies: writing clear instructions, checking whether an output is actually correct, choosing the right tool for a task, designing a workflow that holds up, and using AI within privacy and governance rules. Those are worth building now, and they will still be worth having whatever the OpenAI exam eventually looks like.
Take the free courses if they fit. Keep a record of the work you have done with AI, because a concrete example beats a badge in most interviews. If you want a credential you can sit today, compare the AI certifications that have published blueprints and open registration on their own merits.
We will write practice for the OpenAI exam when there is a published blueprint to write it against, and when the format is one where practice questions actually help. Reporting on the AI Foundations assessment describes scenario-based tasks rather than multiple-choice questions, so that second condition is a real one and not a formality. There is nothing on this site today, and you can read what we are building on the homepage.