As Core AI reaches its six-month anniversary, we also reach an important inflection point for AI in WordPress.
In the earlier “AI Building Blocks for WordPress” post, we outlined a set of foundational projects designed to make WordPress a first-class platform for AI-powered experiences. Six months later, all of those building blocks now exist in a usable, testable state, and several are on track to ship in WordPress 6.9.
This progress is entirely due to the enthusiasm and sustained contributions from people across the WordPress project. What started as a small working group has grown into a coordinated effort to ensure WordPress remains the most powerful CMS possible in the AI era.
A massive kudos to the Core AI team and contributors.
Let’s take a look at what’s been done:
Abilities API in WordPress 6.9
The most visible milestone is the inclusion of the Abilities API in WordPress 6.9.
The Abilities API is a new core API for describing what an AI system can do inside WordPress. It provides:
- A unified registry of “abilities” that can be used to power single-shot AI features (for example, “summarize this post” or “generate a title”).
- A foundation for building more sophisticated agents and multi-step flows.
- A shared vocabulary for capabilities that other systems (and even other APIs) can consume.
Over the past several months, the Abilities API has been adopted and battle-tested by large WordPress projects and plugins. That real-world feedback made it clear this was both important and stable enough to move into core.
- The server implementation of the Abilities API is slated to ship with WordPress 6.9.
- The client implementation will remain in the Gutenberg plugin initially, with the intent to include it in WordPress 7.0 once it has matured further.
This gives theme and plugin authors a stable contract to build on, while allowing the client-side experience to keep evolving rapidly in Gutenberg.
WP Client AI v0.1.0: A Unified PHP AI SDK for WordPress
Another key building block is the WP Client AI API, a canonical PHP SDK for working with AI providers in WordPress.
What began as a general-purpose PHP AI client has now been wrapped, documented, and tailored for the WordPress ecosystem:
- It offers a unified interface for interacting with multiple language model providers.
- It is being adopted by both individual developers and larger plugin companies.
- Several major hosts, including DreamHost and WordPress.com, have begun implementing providers for this shared interface so that sites can opt into AI safely and consistently.
The long-term goal is to ensure that when developers or hosts want to add AI to WordPress, they do not need to reinvent provider integrations. They can use a shared, well-tested API that fits naturally into WordPress development patterns.
We’re expecting to merge WP Client AI into WordPress core (excluding providers) in v7.0, so that the platform itself can ship with a first-class way to talk to AI systems – without taking opinions on which providers to use.
MCP Adapter v0.3.0: Connecting WordPress to the AI Ecosystem
The MCP adapter is the bridge between WordPress and the broader Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem. Over the last six months it has:
- Shipped several major releases to track the latest MCP protocol changes.
- Been deployed in production across various projects, including:
- MCP for the popular forms plugin WS Form.
- WooCommerce MCP integrations.
- MCP-backed functionality powering features on WordPress.com.
Today, the adapter makes any WordPress site an MCP server: it exposes WordPress “abilities” as MCP tools that can be consumed by MCP-enabled clients such as Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and more.
The next phase of work focuses on making the adapter bidirectional:
- WordPress will not only expose its own tools to MCP clients.
- It will also be able to act as an MCP client, consuming external MCP tools and making them available inside WordPress via the Abilities API and future workflow systems.
This unlocks a much richer integration story between WordPress and the wider AI ecosystem.
AI Experiments: A Canonical Plugin for Features and Patterns
As the building blocks matured, the team spent significant time defining what an official AI plugin for WordPress should look like. The result is the AI Experiments plugin.
The initial release of AI Experiments:
- Ships a small set of practical features, such as automatic title generation.
- Serves as a reference implementation of how to use the Abilities API, WP Client AI, and MCP adapter together.
- Provides a place to trial new ideas and patterns before they are elevated into canonical functionality.
Over time, AI Experiments is expected to graduate into the canonical AI plugin for basic AI features in WordPress, balancing experimentation with a clear path to stability. Upcoming releases will introduce excerpt generation, image generation, alt text generation, an Abilities Explorer, and an AI Playground for testing and debugging prompts.
People, Community, and Momentum
The technical progress is only half the story.
Core AI leadership shared this work at WordCamp US 2025, outlining the vision for these building blocks and how they fit into WordPress’s long-term roadmap for AI. At State of the Word 2025, the AI panel -featuring James LePage (Automattic), Felix Arntz (Google), and Jeff Paul (Fueled) – demonstrated the culmination of these efforts with a live release of WordPress 6.9, the first time a WordPress release has been shipped during a keynote.
Since the group formed in mid-2025:
- Dozens of contributors have worked on Core AI-related projects across code, design, documentation, and testing.
- The WordPress project has begun using AI in meaningful ways internally: plugin and theme review teams now leverage AI for code analysis and duplicate detection, reducing review issues by 41%. AI-assisted tooling helps with documentation, and Matt Mullenweg discussed plans for WordPress-specific AI benchmarks and evaluation suites to measure how well AI systems understand and execute WordPress tasks.
- Many companies have pledged time through Five for the Future, contributing hundreds of hours toward AI-related issues and initiatives.
This combination of individual contributors, hosting providers, agencies, and product teams is what has allowed the Core AI effort to move so quickly.
Looking Toward WordPress 7.0 and Beyond
Beyond the imminent 6.9 release, several larger themes are already taking shape for WordPress 7.0 and the broader roadmap.
Abilities + Command Palette
The Abilities API is planned to power the command palette, becoming the primary way to register and present contextual commands to WordPress users. This makes abilities useful even in non-AI scenarios, while also giving AI features a first-class, discoverable home in the UI.
WP Client AI in Core
WP AI Client will be going core in WordPress 7.0. When combined with the Abilities API, this will enable:
- Core-level AI features where appropriate and desired by users.
- A consistent foundation for plugin and theme authors to build upon, instead of many competing approaches.
- A unified path for developers: build AI features once, and let users configure their preferred provider. Or, rely on host-supplied AI services, without additional complexity.
Workflows API and Visual Workflow Editor
Finally, Core AI recently introduced a sister API to Abilities: the Workflows API.
- Where Abilities define what can be done, Workflows define how those abilities are chained together.
- The vision surfaces in a canonical visual editor for workflows that allows users, developers, and site owners to build, run, and manage workflows entirely within WordPress.
- Workflows will sit on top of the Abilities API, and optionally, the WP Client AI, and MCP adapter, making it possible to orchestrate complex, multi-step flows that span plugins, external tools, and AI systems.
A deeper dive into the Workflows API and editor will be published on the primary Make/Core blog, but it is an important part of the Core AI roadmap and ties together much of the work described here.
How to Get Involved
For AI to truly succeed in WordPress, it will require buy-in from two key groups: developers and hosts.
If you’re a developer, even if you barely know how AI works, now is the time to start building. The AI Experiments plugin serves as a reference implementation, the WP AI Client SDK is available via Composer, and the Abilities API gives you a stable contract to build features that will work across providers. Read the full guide: AI for WordPress Developers.
If you work for a hosting company, consider how you can provide AI as part of your platform. When hosts include AI providers, the features developers build simply work- no extra user steps, no API key management, just capabilities that feel like magic. This is a significant competitive advantage and a new dimension for differentiation. Read the full guide: AI for WordPress Hosts.
The key to making this all work is a snowball effect: as developers create AI-powered features, hosts will be enticed to provide AI as part of their platform. As hosts do this, the accessibility of AI will broaden, further encouraging developers to create and innovate more. This symbiosis is what will truly make AI a fundamental part of WordPress.
Closing
It has been an intense and productive six months for Core AI. The building blocks outlined earlier this year are now real projects, with real releases, on their way into WordPress 6.9 and beyond.
There is still a great deal of work ahead, but the foundation is in place:
- Abilities to describe what can be done.
- A shared AI client to talk to providers.
- A bridge to the MCP ecosystem.
- A canonical plugin to trial and refine features.
- And soon, workflows to tie it all together.
If you are interested in helping shape the future of AI in WordPress – whether through code, design, testing, or feedback – the Core AI team welcomes your contributions. Join the #core-ai channel on WordPress Slack, explore the AI Experiments GitHub repository, and help us build the next generation of AI tools for WordPress.