WordPress 7.0 is a milestone worth pausing on before the next thing takes over the conversation.
When I was still building WPAI, the idea of WordPress having first-class AI infrastructure felt distant. It was a blogging platform. A CMS, albeit one with massive distribution. The assumption was that serious AI work happened somewhere else, on purpose-built proprietary platforms with closed ecosystems. WordPress was that legacy platform where you published. AI was where you went to build.
That assumption is now wrong.
When I founded the Core AI team in 2025, the first thing we did was publish a strategy. We called it AI Building Blocks. Four foundational pieces: the Abilities API, the WP AI Client SDK, the MCP Adapter, and the AI Experiments Plugin. When I published that document, I was not confident we would ship all four by 6.9. We did (as discussed at SOTW’25). The technical details are covered in depth here.
Related: The Story on How These Primitives Were Designed
7.0 is where they fully mature. The WP AI Client moves into core. The building blocks become a platform.
WordPress powers nearly a billion websites. Not all of them will update on day one, they never do. But for every site that does, AI infrastructure comes with it, built in, open, and available regardless of host, provider, or budget. No extra cost. No separate integration. Just update.
The openness is the point.
The current trajectory of the AI industry tends toward centralization. A handful of companies control the models. A handful of platforms (try to) control the interfaces. If you want your mindshare meaningfully represented in the agentic web, the path of least resistance is to route through one of those platforms and accept the terms, which aren’t agreeable to privacy, ownership, decentralization and freedom.
WordPress offers a different path. The Abilities API gives any site a machine-readable description of what it can do. The WP AI Client lets developers call any LLM without betting on a single provider. The MCP Adapter surfaces those capabilities to external agents through an open protocol. These come together to allow for anything from a simple ai-assisted automation, to a full suite of Agents that conform to A2A.
Everybody can be a player now. Not metaphorically. A freelance developer, a media company, a small business owner. No permission required.
What comes next extends this further. The Workflows API will let you string abilities together into automations and triggers, making AI actually useful to you in a repeatable, day to day manner. MCP extends from just a server to a client too, meaning WordPress can connect outward to other MCP servers, not just expose itself to them. The shape of that starts to look like an Agent Management System sitting inside your own digital presence. Watch this space.
Phase one was delivery. Phase two is what the ecosystem builds with it. My thoughts on the Future of The Web are becoming more and more of a reality.
That is where this becomes a call to action. The blocks exist. The infrastructure is real. If you work in the WordPress ecosystem and have been watching the AI wave from the sidelines, this is the moment to stop watching. Register an ability. Build a workflow. Point an agent at your site’s MCP endpoint.
More is coming. Core agents, deeper browser integration, further evolution of the MCP layer. The next post goes deeper on what building on top of this stack actually looks like in practice.
The open web is worth building for. WordPress is how we’ve always done it. It’s my goal for it to be how we do it far into the future, too.