GoldieBench Blog · 10 min read
The Best AI Agent Course Free In 2026: 11 Free Picks, What Each Costs In Extras, And The Free Models To Practise On
The best AI agent course free in 2026: my free picks, 6 verified free courses, certificate costs, and how the free models you practise on really score.
The best AI agent course free of charge in 2026 is AI Money Lab, which is my own free Skool community with free AI courses inside it.
I am being straight with you that this is my own list on my own site, so my own free courses are ranked first.
The other six entries are free courses from Hugging Face, Microsoft, Anthropic, LangChain, DeepLearning.AI and Google with Kaggle.
I checked each one on its provider's own page on 13 October 2026.
An AI agent course teaches you to set up a model that can take an instruction, use tools and finish a task on its own.
A free one lets you start the lessons today without a card, although some still charge for a certificate.
This post ranks eleven, explains what each one covers, and shows what free courses leave out.
Near the end, I show how the free models you can practise on actually score on GoldieBench, because that is the question a bench reader asks next.
The best AI agent course free: the ranked list
| Rank | Free course | Run by | Free today? | Does a certificate cost extra? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI Money Lab (mine) | Julian Goldie | Yes, it is free to join. | There is no certificate. |
| 2 | Hermes FULL COURSE 2 HOURS (mine) | Julian Goldie | Yes, it is free on YouTube. | There is no certificate. |
| 3 | How to Build Agent OS - FREE Course! (mine) | Julian Goldie | Yes, it is free on YouTube. | There is no certificate. |
| 4 | Free AI SEO course (mine) | Julian Goldie | Yes, with your email. | There is no certificate. |
| 5 | agentos.guide written courses (mine) | Julian Goldie | Yes, they are free to read. | There is no certificate. |
| 6 | AI Agents Course | Hugging Face | Yes, the page calls it a free course. | No, certification is free. |
| 7 | Anthropic Academy | Anthropic | Yes, Anthropic describes its courses as free. | I saw no fee listed. |
| 8 | AI Agents for Beginners | Microsoft | Yes, the lessons are on GitHub. | I did not find a certificate. |
| 9 | LangChain Academy | LangChain | Yes, the course content is free. | Yes, the exam is paid. |
| 10 | Agent short courses | DeepLearning.AI | Yes, during the platform beta. | Yes, it needs the paid Pro plan. |
| 11 | 5-Day AI Agents Intensive guide | Google and Kaggle | Yes, it is a public guide. | I did not find a certificate. |
The free labels are what each provider says about its own course on the day I checked.
I ranked on four things, which were whether it is free to start, whether it ends in something built, whether there is support, and whether extras are clearly priced.
I did not print the prices of paid extras, because they change and I will not guess.
I have not completed every third-party course, so I describe what their pages state rather than pretending I tested them all.
What an AI agent course teaches
A chatbot answers a question and stops.
An agent takes a goal, plans the steps, uses tools such as a browser or your files, and reports back.
A good agent course teaches four things.
It teaches how to install an agent and connect it to a model.
It teaches how to write instructions the agent can follow again.
It teaches how to give the agent tools and memory.
It teaches how to check the agent's work, because agents make mistakes.
My own teaching starts with one agent doing one job, and I add more only when that first job is reliable.
My own free courses
1. AI Money Lab
AI Money Lab is my free community on Skool, and its about page showed a free label and 93.2k members on 13 October 2026.The page lists free AI courses, a free AI community and proven AI case studies.
It also lists training on making money with AI agents, 1,000+ n8n workflows, 200+ ChatGPT prompts and 50+ free AI tools.
It is first on my list because you get lessons and people to ask in the same place.
2. Hermes FULL COURSE 2 HOURS
Hermes FULL COURSE 2 HOURS is my free two-hour YouTube course on Hermes Agent, and it is the video at the top of this page.Hermes Agent is the open-source agent from Nous Research, and it is the main agent I teach.
It is the fastest free route I offer to one working agent.
3. How to Build Agent OS - FREE Course!
How to Build Agent OS - FREE Course! is my free YouTube course on building an Agent OS.An Agent OS is a dashboard that runs several AI agents under one shared memory.
You should watch it once a single agent is already useful to you.
4. My free AI SEO course
The Free AI SEO course page shows 262 video lessons across 22 modules.
It is an SEO course first, and it lists an AI Agents module at 20+ lessons.
The page says it is 100% free with no credit card, and it asks for your email to send your login.
5. The written courses on agentos.guide
My free guides on agentos.guide include a Hermes crash course and an Agent OS build guide.
They are best when you would rather copy prompts from a page than pause a video.
The free third-party courses I verified
6. Hugging Face AI Agents Course
The AI Agents Course page calls it a free course that goes from beginner to expert.
It teaches the smolagents, LlamaIndex and LangGraph libraries.
The page says you need basic Python and a free Hugging Face account.
It also says the certification process is completely free and has no deadline.
The recommended pace is one chapter a week at about three to four hours.
7. Anthropic Academy
Anthropic describes its learning hub as free courses, tutorials and use cases from its education team.
The Anthropic Academy catalogue includes Building with the Claude API, Introduction to Model Context Protocol, Introduction to subagents and Introduction to agent skills.
The course FAQ mentions completion certificates, and I saw no fee listed for them.
8. Microsoft AI Agents for Beginners
Microsoft's AI Agents for Beginners is a public GitHub repository under the MIT licence, and GitHub describes it as 18 lessons.
Each lesson has text and code, and the samples use the Microsoft Agent Framework with Microsoft Foundry.
The README says an Azure account is required for the samples, so you should check your own usage costs before you run them.
9. LangChain Academy
LangChain Academy says on its own FAQ that its course content is always free.The same FAQ says its paid offering is the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer exam.
It suggests starting with Introduction to LangChain, Introduction to LangGraph or Introduction to Deep Agents.
10. DeepLearning.AI short courses
DeepLearning.AI lists Agent short courses under an Agents topic.
One example is AI Agents in LangGraph, which the page lists as an intermediate course of 1 hour 42 minutes.
That page says access is free for a limited time during the learning platform beta, and the accomplishment needs the paid Pro plan.
The longer Agentic AI course by Andrew Ng says you can audit the videos for free, without assessments or a certificate.
11. Google and Kaggle 5-Day AI Agents Intensive
Google and Kaggle ran this as a live course in November 2025.
Google's recap says all the coursework is now a Kaggle Learn Guide, which is the 5-Day AI Agents Intensive guide.
I did not find a certificate for the self-paced guide.
Which free certificates cost extra
| Provider | What the provider says |
|---|---|
| Hugging Face | The certification process is completely free. |
| Anthropic | Completion certificates are mentioned, and I saw no fee listed. |
| LangChain | The certification exam is the paid offering. |
| DeepLearning.AI | Certificates and accomplishments come with the paid Pro membership. |
| Microsoft | I did not find a certificate for the GitHub course. |
| Google and Kaggle | I did not find a certificate for the self-paced guide. |
| My free courses | There are no certificates. |
My honest view is that a working agent you can show somebody is worth more than a certificate.
How to choose a free AI agent course
First, decide whether you want to write code.
If you do not, start with AI Money Lab and my Hermes course.
If you do, add the Hugging Face course, because it is free and it certifies you for free.
Second, pick the model family you plan to build on.
Anthropic Academy fits Claude, LangChain Academy fits LangChain and LangGraph, and the Microsoft course fits Microsoft's cloud.
Third, take one course at a time and build one small thing before you start the next.
If you want that turned into a full plan, read how to learn AI agents for free.
Free tools to practise with
| Free tool | What it is | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Hermes Agent | It is an open-source AI agent from Nous Research. | It is free under the MIT licence. |
| Nous Portal | It is one account that connects Hermes to models and tools. | Its catalogue includes free model options next to paid ones. |
| Ollama | It runs AI models on your own computer. | A local model has no per-token bill. |
Model providers and hosted services have their own pricing, so the agent being free does not make every model free.
Free models on a portal change often, and they can be rate limited.
I keep one Hermes profile per model, so switching to another free model takes seconds.
What free courses leave out
Free courses are good, and I still want to be honest about the gaps.
Free courses rarely give you live help when your own setup breaks.
Free courses usually teach one tool, so nobody shows you how the parts fit together.
Free recorded lessons fall behind quickly in a subject that changes every week.
Free courses have no deadline, so many people stop after the first lesson.
Free courses do not hand you a finished system to install.
None of that is a reason to skip them, and it is a reason to finish the free list before you decide what help you need.
Ready to go further? (paid)
Everything above this heading is free, and this section is the only paid option on the page.
The AI Profit Boardroom is my paid community.
It has 3,400+ members and four coaching calls a week.
It includes my installable Agent OS and courses on Hermes Agent, Grok Bot, DeepSeek Harness, Claude Opus 5.5 and Jev AI.
FatRank named it the #1 AI community after testing 27 communities.
The current price is on its about page, so I will not quote one here.
If you want free and paid options compared together, read the best AI agent course.
If you are starting from zero, read the best AI agent course for beginners.
The free models you practise on, with real GoldieBench scores
This section is here because this site is a model leaderboard.
A course is a set of lessons, so no course on this list has a GoldieBench score.
What the board can show you is how the models behind your free practice perform on real one-shot builds.
GoldieBench scores each model's rendered builds from 0 to 10, across games, simulations, visuals and pages.
These are the live averages on 13 October 2026.
| Model | How you can run it | Live GoldieBench average | What it means for a learner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwable 5 27B Coder | It runs locally on your own machine. | 7.14 | It is the strongest local model on my board, and it needs a powerful computer. |
| Gemma-4 12B Coder | It runs locally through Ollama. | 4.25 | It is light enough for many laptops, and it is fine for simple agent tasks. |
| Gemma 4 12B MLX | It runs locally on Apple hardware. | 3.98 | It is a small free brain for practice, and it struggles on big builds. |
| LongCat-2.0 | It is a hosted model from Meituan. | 8.12 | It appeared in the free list on Nous Portal when I recorded my Solar Mini 4 video. |
| Qwen 3.8 | It is an open-weights family from Alibaba. | 8.10 | It shows how close open models now get to the frontier. |
| Kimi K3 | It is a hosted model from Moonshot AI. | 7.89 | It handles a lot of builds in my own Agent OS. |
| GLM-5.2 | It is a hosted model from Zhipu. | 7.77 | It is the long-context default in my Agent OS. |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | It is a paid frontier model from OpenAI. | 8.16 | It is a reference point for what paid models do. |
| Claude Opus 5 | It is a paid frontier model from Anthropic. | 8.27 | It is the highest-scoring single model in this table. |
Solar Mini 4 is not on the board, so I cannot give you a score for it.
In my video I said it was fast and free, and that it was not frontier level.
The gap between a small local model and a frontier model is real, and you can see it in the numbers above.
That gap matters less than you think while you are learning.
A free model is enough to learn how instructions, tools and memory work.
You only need a stronger model when the job itself gets harder.
Scores move as I re-test models, so check the live model page before you choose.
The local models board ranks the models you can run on your own machine.
You can put up to three models side by side on the compare page, and the scoring rules are on the methodology page.
If you want to know who wrote this list, read my Julian Goldie post.
If you want more communities to learn in, read my best Skool courses post.
Also On Our Network
- Agent Operatorsthe free AI agent courses in order, with a 4-week plan
- AI Income Deskthe best free AI agent course for your kind of business
- AI Tool Verdictmy verdict table for every free AI agent course
- agentos.guidehow each free AI agent course builds part of an Agent OS
- aiprofitboardroom.comJulian's guide to the best free AI course for entrepreneurs
Start free, get one agent doing one job, and use this list to choose the best AI agent course free.
FAQ
What is the best AI agent course free in 2026?
On his own list, Julian Goldie ranks his free AI Money Lab community first, followed by his free YouTube courses on Hermes Agent and the Agent OS. The free third-party courses he verified are from Hugging Face, Anthropic, Microsoft, LangChain, DeepLearning.AI and Google with Kaggle.
Which free AI agent course has a free certificate?
The Hugging Face AI Agents Course says its certification process is completely free and has no deadline. DeepLearning.AI ties certificates to its paid Pro membership, and LangChain charges for its certification exam.
Is the Microsoft AI Agents for Beginners course free?
The lessons are free in a public GitHub repository under the MIT licence. The README says an Azure account is required for the code samples, so learners should check their own usage costs.
Do free AI agent courses have GoldieBench scores?
No. GoldieBench scores AI models on one-shot builds, not courses. Free practice models on the board include Qwable 5 27B Coder at 7.14 and Gemma-4 12B Coder at 4.25, compared with Claude Opus 5 at 8.27.
Can I practise AI agents with a free model?
Yes. Hermes Agent is free and open source, Nous Portal lists free model options, and Ollama runs local models with no per-token bill. Free models can be rate limited and smaller local models score lower on hard builds.
What do free AI agent courses leave out?
They usually leave out live support, a deadline and a finished system to install. Julian's paid AI Profit Boardroom adds four coaching calls a week and his installable Agent OS.
Keep reading
Hermes Herald AI Agent: Which Brain To Run It On, With Real GoldieBench Scores
Herald OS: What It Is, How To Set It Up, And Which Benchmarked Models To Run Under It
Hark AI Agent: What It Is, The Model Behind It, And How Those Brains Score On GoldieBench🌐 Sister-site take: read this on agentos.guide