Thirteen free ways to learn AI, and I opened every link

Search for "free AI course" and you get forty listicles that all copy each other. Half the links are dead. One or two are paid and nobody mentions it.

So here is a shorter list. I opened every link before putting it here, and I have written down what each one actually is, who made it, and what language it is in.

The important part is not the number of links. It is that the first three are made by the companies that built these tools, they are free, and almost nobody knows they exist.

Start with the official ones

The companies who built Claude and ChatGPT both launched their own free courses. This is new. A year ago it did not exist.

Claude Academy — academy.claude.com

Anthropic's own courses, expanded this month. The beginner track is AI Fluency: Framework and Foundations, fourteen lessons and about four hours, followed by AI Capabilities and Limitations, thirteen lessons. That second one is the one to actually do. It teaches you what these tools cannot do, which is the thing that stops you trusting a wrong answer.

If four hours sounds like a lot, there is a seven-minute tutorial called The 4 Properties of AI. Start there.

OpenAI Academy — applying AI at work

OpenAI's own free courses, with free certificates at the end. Three of them: AI Foundations, Applied AI Foundations, and Agents and Workflows.

For Gemini, Google has no equivalent free course for one person learning on their own. The pages that look like one are aimed at schools and colleges buying it for their staff. So open gemini.google.com, sign in with the Google account you already have, and use the tutorials below.

Claude, on YouTube

The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Claude AI — Metics Media youtu.be/9oJySubZRSA

Claude AI Full Course in 2 Hours: Everything You Need to Know (2026) — WsCube Tech youtu.be/3RCFAZHs8R8

Claude – Full Course 2026 (How to use Claude AI for beginners) — AI Master, a playlist full playlist

Master Claude AI - Full Course in Hindi — The Skillhouse, a playlist. This one is in Hindi. full playlist

ChatGPT, on YouTube

ChatGPT – Free Course 2026 (How to use Chat GPT for beginners) — AI Master, a playlist full playlist

ChatGPT Tutorial: How to Use Chat GPT For Beginners — Charlie Chang youtu.be/Gaf_jCnA6mc

ChatGPT Tutorial: 35 Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner — Matt Wolfe youtu.be/WTF5qphyy8w

23 Ways to Use ChatGPT So Well it Feels Like Cheating — Dan Martell youtu.be/7zPQV1BSH_k

Gemini, on YouTube

How To Master Google Gemini in 2026 (Free Course) — Paul J Lipsky youtu.be/-_FizlRlfYs

Google Gemini Masterclass: Prompt Engineering Course in Hindi — SkillarCode. This one is in Hindi. youtu.be/engCIoHSSWA

Google Gemini FULL COURSE 3 HOURS (Build and Automate Anything) — Julian Goldie SEO. Three hours, so treat it as a reference to dip into rather than something to sit through. youtu.be/FiVR9FBdpZA

The paid one everybody calls free

Google AI Essentials costs $49. It is on Coursera, it is genuinely decent, and it appears on nearly every "free AI courses" list you will find. It is not free. If a list you are reading includes it without saying so, the person writing it did not open the link.

What to actually do today

Do not open thirteen tabs. You will close all of them.

Pick the tool you already use most. If that is ChatGPT, watch Charlie Chang's tutorial. If it is Claude, do the seven-minute one on Claude Academy.

Then use it on one real task from your own work today. Not a practice question. A real email, a real listing, a real assignment. That single step teaches you more than three hours of watching.