The strongest AI red teaming training courses right now are SANS SEC536 for instructor-led depth across LLMs, RAG pipelines and agents, OffSec AI-300 for a proctored, exam-backed red team credential, and the Hack The Box AI Red Teamer path for affordable, lab-heavy practice that leads into a seven-day practical exam. Each one teaches you to attack real AI applications rather than just describe the risks.
AI red teaming is still a young discipline, and the course market moves fast. If you are building a wider skill set, pair this list with our guides to the top cloud security training providers and the top cyber ranges and hands-on security training platforms, since most AI systems you test will sit on cloud infrastructure.
We checked every provider’s own site for course content, format and pricing in October 2026.
| Provider | Program | Format | Best For |
| SANS Institute | SEC536 Adversarial AI (GAIPT) | 3 days live or self-paced, 15 labs | Pentesters who want structured depth |
| OffSec | AI-300 Advanced AI Red Teaming (OSAI+) | Self-paced, 24-hour proctored exam | Experienced testers seeking a hard credential |
| Hack The Box | AI Red Teamer path and HTB COAE | 12 modules, 7-day practical exam | Hands-on learners on a budget |
| Learn Prompting | AI Security Masterclass+ (AIRTP+) | On-demand video, 24-hour practical exam | Prompt injection and jailbreak specialists |
| Practical DevSecOps | Certified AI Security Professional (CAISP) | Self-paced, 50+ browser labs | AppSec and DevSecOps engineers |
| PortSwigger | Web Security Academy: Web LLM attacks | Free online topic, 7 labs | Web testers adding LLM skills |
| Microsoft | AI Red Teaming 101 series | 10 video episodes with labs | Teams adopting PyRIT automation |
| TryHackMe | AI Security learning path | 5 modules in the browser | Beginners and defenders |
| AppSecEngineer | AI and LLM Security learning path | 9 short courses with labs | Developers securing agent features |
| DeepLearning.AI | Red Teaming LLM Applications | Short video course with notebooks | ML engineers wanting a fast primer |
SEC536: Adversarial AI, Penetration Testing AI Systems is the most complete instructor-led option we found. Authored by Foster Nethercott and Mick Douglas, it runs three days live or 18 hours self-paced, with 15 hands-on labs. The syllabus moves from how LLMs process input and how to recon an AI stack, through direct and indirect prompt injection, RAG and memory poisoning, jailbreaks and guardrail evasion, into exposed inference hosts, model weight extraction, agent attacks and MCP server exploitation.
The course aligns with the GIAC AI Penetration Tester (GAIPT) certification. The OnDemand version was listed at $5,250 with four months of access on its site in October 2026. Note the lab requirements: an Intel x64 laptop with VT-x and VMware, since Apple Silicon is not supported. SANS also runs SEC537: AI for Offensive Security, a six-day, 29-lab course that combines this adversarial material with using AI for offensive work, listed at $8,780 for 2026 to 2027 live events.
Best for: penetration testers and AppSec teams with a training budget who want a structured, certifiable curriculum.
OffSec, the company behind OSCP, released AI-300: Advanced AI Red Teaming on March 31, 2026. It is a 300-level, self-paced course with roughly 50 to 100 hours of content across 11 modules, covering attacks on LLMs, multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, embeddings and AI infrastructure. The labs simulate enterprise AI environments with vector databases, orchestration frameworks and cloud AI services rather than isolated chatbots.
The exam is the draw. It is a 24-hour practical red team engagement against an AI-enabled enterprise network, proctored over a private VPN. Passing earns the OSAI certification, which does not expire, plus the OSAI+ designation, which lasts three years unless renewed through continuing education. Pricing started at $1,749 as listed on its site in October 2026, and the course is sold through the course and exam bundle, Learn One and enterprise plans. OffSec describes it as advanced, so expect to need solid offensive fundamentals first.
Best for: experienced pentesters who want a recognized, hands-on AI red teaming certification.
Hack The Box built its AI Red Teamer job role path with Google, and it aligns the content to Google’s Secure AI Framework (SAIF). The path is rated Hard and contains 12 modules: AI fundamentals, applications of AI in infosec, introduction to red teaming, prompt injection attacks, LLM output attacks, AI data attacks, attacking AI applications and systems, three AI evasion modules, AI privacy and AI defense.
In April 2026 HTB launched the HTB Certified Offensive AI Expert (HTB COAE). It is a seven-day practical exam in a simulated corporate environment where you run a full offensive AI assessment and write it up, with no multiple choice. HTB says the path and an exam voucher are included with the Silver Annual subscription on HTB Academy, which makes this one of the lowest-cost routes to a practical AI red team credential. Teams can access it through HTB’s business plans.
Best for: self-directed learners who want deep lab time and a long-form practical exam without a five-figure budget.
Learn Prompting’s AI Red Teaming, Prompt Hacking and AI Security Masterclass+ is taught by Sander Schulhoff, who created the HackAPrompt competition and co-authored research on it that won Best Theme Paper at EMNLP 2023. The course is on demand, with 14 recorded videos, written study guides and about 25 hours of learning, plus guest sessions from other AI security practitioners and a private community.
The curriculum focuses on the model layer: red teaming fundamentals, the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications, prompt injection and jailbreaking, advanced prompt hacking, defenses, and automated red teaming with PyRIT. Three hands-on projects run in the HackAPrompt playground. The AIRTP+ certification is earned by passing a separate 24-hour practical exam, and the purchase includes one attempt and one free retake. It was listed at $1,199 one time, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, on its site in October 2026.
Best for: testers who want to get very good at prompt injection and jailbreaks specifically.
The Certified AI Security Professional (CAISP) course is built for engineers who need both the attack and the fix. Its seven chapters cover AI security basics, attacking LLMs with MITRE ATLAS as a reference, the OWASP LLM Top 10, AI attacks and defenses in DevOps pipelines, STRIDE threat modeling for AI systems, AI supply chain attacks, and governance frameworks such as NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act.
The supply chain chapter is a real differentiator. Labs include scanning a malicious pickle file, working with SBOMs and signing models with Cosign, alongside prompt injection and agent abuse exercises. All 50+ labs run in the browser with no VM setup, and lab access lasts 60 days. The exam is task-based: five challenges in six hours, then 24 hours to submit a report. The list price was $1,099 on its site in October 2026, and the cert carries 36 CPE points with lifetime validity.
Best for: AppSec, DevSecOps and MLOps engineers who own AI pipelines as well as test them.
PortSwigger’s Web Security Academy is 100% free, and its Web LLM attacks topic is the best no-cost starting point for anyone who already tests web applications.
The written material covers detecting LLM vulnerabilities, exploiting LLM APIs, functions and plugins, insecure output handling, indirect prompt injection, training data poisoning, leaking sensitive training data, defenses, and vulnerabilities in AI-powered scanners. Seven labs let you practice against live targets, including an indirect prompt injection lab and exercises where you abuse an LLM’s excessive API access.
Best for: web pentesters and bug bounty hunters adding LLM features to their scope.
Microsoft’s AI Red Team published its AI Red Teaming 101 series on Microsoft Learn, drawing on case studies from its own work testing production generative AI. It has 10 modular episodes that you can watch in any order, with downloadable slides and links to Microsoft’s hands-on red teaming labs.
Episodes 3 to 6 cover core attacks: direct and indirect prompt injection, single-turn techniques such as persona hacking and encoding-based filter evasion, and multi-turn attacks including Skeleton Key and Crescendo. Episode 7 covers mitigations such as Microsoft’s Spotlighting methods. Episodes 8 to 10 teach PyRIT, Microsoft’s open-source Python Risk Identification Tool, showing how to configure datasets, targets and scorers to send prompts at scale, run automated multi-turn conversations, and test image generation systems. It is short on infrastructure and agent exploitation, but it is the clearest guide to automating LLM testing we found.
Best for: security teams that need to run repeatable, automated testing against their own models.
TryHackMe launched its AI Security learning path in April 2026. TryHackMe describes it as 25 rooms across five modules, including eight challenge rooms, organized around the OWASP LLM Top 10 and aimed at beginner to intermediate learners.
The modules are AI fundamentals (threats, adversarial attack detection and AI forensics), secure AI systems (LLM security, threat modeling, recon and attack surface assessment), model security (supply chain risk, malicious model detection, backdoors and trojans), prompt injection (direct, indirect and mitigations) and data poisoning (RAG security, model poisoning and sensitive information disclosure). The framing leans defensive: you attack AI systems in order to understand and test defenses. TryHackMe’s path page estimates about 19 hours to complete.
Best for: newcomers and SOC analysts who want a guided, low-friction first pass at AI attacks.
AppSecEngineer’s AI and LLM Security learning path is a set of nine short, lab-backed courses written from the builder’s side. Titles include Attacking and Defending Prompt Injection, Attacking and Defending Excessive Agency, Attacking and Defending Sensitive Information Disclosure, Semantic Input Validation using LLMs, and two Model Context Protocol courses on tool poisoning and tool shadowing attacks and how to detect them.
Those MCP courses are why it makes this list. Agentic tool-use attacks are where much of the real risk now sits, and few providers teach them hands-on yet. Each course pairs the attack with a defensive control, so it suits engineers who will fix what they find. The path page listed all of its courses as a bundle at $399, down from $828, in October 2026. The company lists offices in Fairfax, Virginia and Singapore.
Best for: developers and product security engineers shipping agents and MCP integrations.
Red Teaming LLM Applications is a short course DeepLearning.AI built with Giskard, taught by Matteo Dora, Giskard’s lead LLM safety researcher, and Luca Martial, its product lead. It runs about an hour and forty minutes across seven video lessons, a reading and a graded quiz, with code you run alongside the videos.
You learn to find and evaluate vulnerabilities in LLM applications, apply red teaming methods borrowed from cybersecurity, run prompt injection attacks, and move from manual probing to automated testing with Giskard’s open-source library. It skips infrastructure and agent exploitation, but it is a quick, practical introduction for people who build LLM apps. Enrollment was free on its site in October 2026, with the graded assignment and certificate requiring a PRO membership.
Best for: ML and application engineers who want a fast primer before testing their own features.
AI red teaming covers several layers. Some courses focus on the model itself (jailbreaks, prompt injection, evasion), others on the application around it (output handling, API abuse, agents and MCP tools), and a few on infrastructure and supply chain (inference hosts, vector databases, poisoned model files). Learn Prompting is strongest at the model layer, PortSwigger and AppSecEngineer at the application layer, and SANS, OffSec and Practical DevSecOps reach into infrastructure and supply chain. Match the course to the systems you will actually be scoped to test.
If a hiring manager or client needs proof, choose a course with a practical exam: OffSec OSAI+, HTB COAE, Learn Prompting AIRTP+, Practical DevSecOps CAISP or SANS GAIPT. If you only need working skills, the free PortSwigger labs and the Microsoft series will take you surprisingly far. For a broader view of practical credentials, see our guide to the top cloud penetration testing certifications.
This field changes month to month. Check whether a syllabus mentions agents, tool use, MCP and RAG, not just chatbot jailbreaks. Several courses on this list launched or were rewritten in 2026, and older material that stops at prompt injection against a single chat window will leave gaps in a real engagement.
Costs range from free (PortSwigger, Microsoft, DeepLearning.AI) to a few hundred dollars on subscription platforms, to $1,000 to $2,000 for exam-backed courses, to more than $5,000 for SANS. Also check the lab model. Browser labs (TryHackMe, Practical DevSecOps) need no setup, while SANS requires an Intel laptop with VMware and OffSec AI-300 labs currently run over VPN.
AI red teaming is adversarial testing of AI systems to find ways they can be manipulated or abused before attackers do. It covers prompt injection and jailbreaks, data and RAG poisoning, abuse of agents and the tools they can call, data leakage, model theft and supply chain attacks on model files. Good AI red teamers combine web and infrastructure pentesting skills with an understanding of how models behave.
For a hard, proctored credential, OffSec’s OSAI+ is the closest equivalent to OSCP for AI systems. HTB COAE offers a longer seven-day practical exam at a lower cost through an HTB Academy subscription. SANS GAIPT suits those who prefer instructor-led training. For prompt injection specifically, Learn Prompting’s AIRTP+ is a well-known AI red teaming certification.
Yes. PortSwigger’s Web LLM attacks labs are free, Microsoft’s AI Red Teaming 101 series and its open-source PyRIT tool are published openly, and the DeepLearning.AI short course was free to enroll in October 2026. Together they cover prompt injection, LLM API abuse, automated testing and evaluation. Paid courses add depth on agents, infrastructure and supply chain, plus a certification.
These are the top AI red teaming training courses in 2026, and the right pick depends on where you start. Experienced pentesters should look at SANS SEC536 or OffSec AI-300. Budget-conscious learners who want a practical exam should start with the Hack The Box AI Red Teamer path and HTB COAE, and web testers can begin today with PortSwigger’s free labs. Whichever AI red teaming training courses you choose, look for hands-on coverage of agents, tool use and RAG, because that is where real engagements now find the most serious issues.
If you would rather hire testers than train them, our list of the top cloud penetration testing companies covers firms that assess the cloud platforms most AI workloads run on.