AIF-C01 Practice Questions — Free

AIF-C01 is a foundational AWS certification for people whose work touches AI without training the models: product and program people, analysts, consultants, and engineers who want the vocabulary before going deeper. It assumes no coding and no model training, which makes it a companion to CLF-C02 rather than a step beyond it.

Its five domains move from AI and machine learning fundamentals, through generative AI concepts, to applying foundation models, largely through Amazon Bedrock, and finish with responsible AI and the security, compliance and governance of AI workloads. Applications of Foundation Models is the largest of the five. The two governance domains are the smallest, but together they carry a real share of the exam, and they are the questions that decide whether an AI project would actually be allowed to ship.

What the exam rewards is judgement more than definitions: telling a generative problem from a predictive one, and choosing between prompting, retrieval-augmented generation and fine-tuning for a reason you can say out loud.

How AIF-C01 is weighted

  1. Fundamentals of AI and ML20%
  2. Fundamentals of GenAI24%
  3. Applications of Foundation Models28%
  4. Guidelines for Responsible AI14%
  5. Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions14%

Fundamentals of AI and ML

5 questions

  1. Question 1 of 25

    What is the difference between AI and ML?

    • A.They are unrelated fields with no overlap in methods
    • B.AI refers only to robotics, while ML refers only to statistics
    • C.ML is a subset of AI focused on learning patterns from dataCorrect
    • D.AI is a subset of ML focused on rule-based decision logic

    Answer: C

    ML is one approach within the broader AI field.

  2. Question 2 of 25 · multiple response

    Which of the following are examples of unsupervised learning? (Select TWO)

    • A.Topic discovery in documentsCorrect
    • B.Spam classification with labeled emails
    • C.House price regression
    • D.Customer segmentation via clusteringCorrect

    Answers: A, D

    Clustering and topic modeling work without labels.

  3. Question 3 of 25

    A shipping company wants to estimate delivery time in hours for each package. What model output type is this?

    • A.A cluster identifier from an unsupervised model
    • B.A continuous value from a regression modelCorrect
    • C.A reward signal from a reinforcement learning agent
    • D.A discrete class label from a classification model

    Answer: B

    Hours is a continuous quantity.

  4. Question 4 of 25

    A team must convert raw customer records into numeric inputs suitable for a model. What is this stage of the ML lifecycle?

    • A.Model deployment to an endpoint
    • B.Model monitoring for drift
    • C.Real-time inference on new data
    • D.Feature engineeringCorrect

    Answer: D

    Feature engineering transforms raw data into model-ready features.

  5. Question 5 of 25

    A team wants the model to learn from streaming data continuously rather than retraining from scratch. What concept is this?

    • A.Transfer learning from another domain
    • B.Online or incremental learningCorrect
    • C.Batch training on a fixed dataset
    • D.Zero-shot inference without training

    Answer: B

    Incremental learning updates the model as new data arrives.

Fundamentals of GenAI

6 questions

  1. Question 6 of 25

    A model trained on data up to a certain date cannot answer about later events. What is this limitation called?

    • A.Context window limit
    • B.Knowledge cutoffCorrect
    • C.Hallucination tendency
    • D.Inference latency

    Answer: B

    The knowledge cutoff is the point after which the model has no training data.

  2. Question 7 of 25

    A prompt is written to ask the model to critique and revise its own first answer. What technique is this?

    • A.Zero-shot prompting without examples
    • B.Self-refinement or self-critique promptingCorrect
    • C.Data augmentation of the training set
    • D.Model distillation into a smaller model

    Answer: B

    Self-critique prompts improve output through iteration.

  3. Question 8 of 25

    A team wants a model to translate documents while preserving formatting like tables. Which model capability matters?

    • A.Speech synthesis of the translated document text
    • B.Image generation of the translated document pages
    • C.Time-series forecasting of translation demand
    • D.Instruction following with structured output supportCorrect

    Answer: D

    Instruction-following preserves structure.

  4. Question 9 of 25

    A team fine-tunes a model and then finds it performs worse on general tasks it previously handled well. What is this called?

    • A.Training data leakage
    • B.Hallucination in outputs
    • C.Catastrophic forgettingCorrect
    • D.Prompt injection by users

    Answer: C

    Fine-tuning can overwrite general capabilities if not managed carefully.

  5. Question 10 of 25

    A company wants to understand what 'fine-tuning' changes in a model. What is correct?

    • A.It adjusts the model's weights using task-specific dataCorrect
    • B.It increases the size of the model's context window
    • C.It changes only the prompt template used at runtime
    • D.It changes the API endpoint the model is served from

    Answer: A

    Fine-tuning updates weights.

  6. Question 11 of 25

    A team notices an LLM's knowledge stops at a certain date. What is this limitation called?

    • A.Temperature ceiling
    • B.Token budget exhaustion
    • C.Training data cutoffCorrect
    • D.Context window limit

    Answer: C

    Models only know information present in their training data up to the cutoff.

Applications of Foundation Models

7 questions

  1. Question 12 of 25

    A team wants to constrain an agent to complete tasks within a fixed number of reasoning steps. What does this control?

    • A.The IAM policy attached to the agent's execution role
    • B.Cost and runaway loops during agent orchestrationCorrect
    • C.The parameter count of the agent's foundation model
    • D.The size of the vector database the agent queries

    Answer: B

    Step limits prevent unbounded agent execution.

  2. Question 13 of 25

    A RAG application returns irrelevant documents. What component most likely needs improvement?

    • A.The output token limit on the model's responses
    • B.The temperature setting on the generation step
    • C.The retrieval step, such as chunking or embedding qualityCorrect
    • D.The IAM role attached to the application

    Answer: C

    Retrieval quality depends on how documents are chunked and embedded.

  3. Question 14 of 25

    A team wants to import a model they fine-tuned elsewhere into Bedrock for inference. What capability supports this?

    • A.Model Evaluation jobs
    • B.Custom Model ImportCorrect
    • C.Guardrails for content filtering
    • D.Knowledge Bases for retrieval

    Answer: B

    Custom Model Import brings externally trained weights into Bedrock.

  4. Question 15 of 25

    A developer wants to use a foundation model from a Python application. What do they use?

    • A.Amazon Polly's Python client library
    • B.SSH access to the model's underlying host
    • C.The AWS SDK to call the Bedrock InvokeModel APICorrect
    • D.The AWS Console's playground interface only

    Answer: C

    SDK calls to Bedrock APIs integrate models into applications.

  5. Question 16 of 25

    A team fine-tunes a model but has only 200 examples. What is a likely risk?

    • A.Overfitting to the small dataset with poor generalizationCorrect
    • B.Loss of IAM permissions on the fine-tuned model
    • C.The model becoming too large to deploy on an endpoint
    • D.Excessive inference cost due to the added examples

    Answer: A

    Small fine-tuning sets risk overfitting.

  6. Question 17 of 25

    A team wants a model to draft responses that an agent reviews before sending. What pattern is this?

    • A.Zero-shot generation with no human review at all
    • B.Fully autonomous responses sent without review
    • C.Human-in-the-loop with AI-generated draftsCorrect
    • D.Batch inference of all responses overnight only

    Answer: C

    Drafts plus human review balance speed and control.

  7. Question 18 of 25

    A team wants to extract key-value pairs from insurance claim forms at scale. Which service fits?

    • A.Amazon Polly
    • B.Amazon Comprehend
    • C.Amazon TextractCorrect
    • D.Amazon Lex

    Answer: C

    Textract extracts form fields.

Guidelines for Responsible AI

4 questions

  1. Question 19 of 25

    A team wants documentation of a model's intended use, limitations, and evaluation results. What SageMaker feature supports this?

    • A.SageMaker Ground Truth
    • B.SageMaker Model CardsCorrect
    • C.SageMaker Canvas
    • D.SageMaker Pipelines

    Answer: B

    Model Cards capture model metadata for governance and transparency.

  2. Question 20 of 25

    A company wants to ensure AI-generated customer messages are reviewed for tone and accuracy. Which principle does this support?

    • A.Redundancy of the message store
    • B.Elasticity of the messaging system
    • C.Low latency of message delivery
    • D.Human oversight and quality controlCorrect

    Answer: D

    Review ensures accountability.

  3. Question 21 of 25

    A model used for credit decisions must not use protected attributes like race. What practice addresses this?

    • A.Allocating more GPUs to the inference endpoint
    • B.Raising the temperature to diversify the decisions
    • C.Increasing the model's size to capture more nuance
    • D.Excluding protected attributes and testing for proxy variablesCorrect

    Answer: D

    Removing protected features and checking proxies reduces discriminatory outcomes.

  4. Question 22 of 25

    A team notices a model's outputs are less accurate for non-native English speakers. What should they do?

    • A.Ignore the difference as an acceptable model limitation
    • B.Reduce logging to lower the ongoing cost of monitoring
    • C.Evaluate by user group and improve data representationCorrect
    • D.Increase the temperature to diversify the model's outputs

    Answer: C

    Group-level evaluation and better data address disparities.

Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions

3 questions

  1. Question 23 of 25

    A company wants to prevent developers from exporting fine-tuned model weights out of AWS. What control helps?

    • A.IAM policies restricting model export and artifact accessCorrect
    • B.A larger context window on the fine-tuned model
    • C.Public S3 access to the model artifact bucket
    • D.A higher temperature on the fine-tuned model

    Answer: A

    Access controls prevent unauthorized export.

  2. Question 24 of 25

    An organization wants to prevent employees from using unapproved external AI tools with company data. What control helps?

    • A.Larger context windows on the approved internal models
    • B.Public S3 buckets for sharing prompts across teams
    • C.Higher temperature settings on the approved internal models
    • D.Data loss prevention policies and approved internal AI toolsCorrect

    Answer: D

    DLP and sanctioned tools reduce shadow AI risk.

  3. Question 25 of 25

    A company wants only certain teams to invoke a specific Bedrock model. What enforces this?

    • A.Raising the model's temperature for those teams only
    • B.A public API gateway placed in front of the model
    • C.A larger context window configured for the model
    • D.IAM policies scoping bedrock:InvokeModel to that model's ARNCorrect

    Answer: D

    Resource-scoped IAM permissions control model access.

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