CompTIA SecAI+ (CY0-001)

SecAI+ is the AI security exam an engineer can actually sit. That sounds like faint praise until you look at the alternatives: ISACA's AAISM requires an active CISM or CISSP, and the IAPP's AIGP is governance-first and written for a much broader audience.

This one has no certification prerequisite and puts 40% of its marks on securing AI systems.

Where the marks are

Unusually easy to prioritise. Securing AI Systems is 40% on its own — model and endpoint security, prompt injection defence, permissions, supply chain, guardrails. Nothing else is close.

The rest splits fairly evenly: AI-assisted Security 24%, AI Governance, Risk and Compliance 19%, and Basic AI Concepts 17%.

If you have thirty hours, spend fifteen of them in the first domain and you will have covered the exam roughly in proportion to how it is scored.

Choosing between the three AI security certifications

This site covers all three, and the choice is usually made for you by the prerequisite rather than by the syllabus.

SecAI+ — no gate, engineer-facing, 40% on building and defending AI systems. The one that matches the work if you are on the AI security engineer path.

AAISM — requires CISM or CISSP. A management credential for people who already hold a senior security certification and have acquired AI inside their remit.

AIGP — no gate, but governance-first, and its audience deliberately includes legal and policy people rather than only engineers.

The honest caveat

It launched on 17 February 2026. That is recent enough that almost no hiring manager has formed a view of what it means, and a certification's value in hiring is entirely a matter of what people believe about it.

So the syllabus is the return here, not the badge — and the syllabus is good. Two fifths of it is the actual technical work of securing an AI system, which is more than any competing credential devotes to the same material. Study it for that, and treat the recognition as something that may or may not arrive.

Before you book

Sixty questions in sixty minutes. One minute each, with performance-based items mixed in. That pace rewards familiarity over deliberation, so practise until the vocabulary is automatic rather than reconstructed.

600 on a 100–900 scale to pass. Valid three years, renewable through CompTIA's continuing education programme rather than by resitting.

CompTIA does not publish a price on the certification page. Vouchers go through the CompTIA store and resellers, and the figure varies by region and bundle — so check before budgeting rather than trusting a number quoted elsewhere.