The past six or seven weeks have been some of the most the most productive I’ve seen since joining. A lot of this was building slowly and in the open, and then suddenly all at once. None of it would have been possible without the recent foundational work we’ve been doing in WordPress Core – the Abilities API in 6.9, the WP AI Client, the MCP Adapter.
That infrastructure is what’s allowing the product layer ship so fast here at Automattic. Here’s what we’ve shipped:
January
- OAuth 2.1 for AI agents on WordPress.com – We shipped a proper auth layer so AI agents can connect to WordPress.com sites securely. The unglamorous but necessary piece to make everything that followed actually usable in production.
February
- WordPress MCP Adapter – A full MCP implementation on top of the Abilities API we shipped in WordPress 6.9. Any AI tool (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code) can now discover and call WordPress capabilities directly. Register an ability in your plugin, require the adapter, and you’re AI-ready with almost no extra work. We used this to power…
- WordPress.com Claude Connector – Our official Anthropic integration, covered by TechCrunch. Connect Claude to your WordPress.com site through a simple OAuth flow and start querying your analytics, content, and site settings through conversation. Write access is coming.
- Content Guidelines as a Gutenberg experiment – A proposal to give site owners a first-class place inside WordPress to define their editorial rules and context. Not AI-specific on the surface, but it’s the foundation that lets agents understand why a site publishes the way it does. This is heading toward a core feature and will matter a lot for the agentic web.
- Claude Cowork Plugin + Agent Skills for WordPress – Describe a site in plain language to Claude, get a complete block theme deployed to a local WordPress Studio instance. We also shipped a public Skills repository of reusable instruction sets that work in Claude, Cursor, Codex, wherever. These are changing weekly.
- WordPress Studio 1.7.0 – The CLI now covers nearly every Studio feature, which means full compatibility with AI-assisted dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Studio is quietly one of the best local environments for agent-driven WordPress development now, and there’s a lot more on the way in the next few months here.
- Proposal to merge the WP AI Client into WordPress 7.0 core – When this lands, WordPress will have native, provider-agnostic AI query capability built in. For WordPress.com specifically: we will be one of the first hosts to ship with an AI provider configured out of the box. No API key setup, no plugin hunting. AI just works.
- WordPress.com AI Assistant – Launched today, covered by TechCrunch and Engadget. Persistent AI inside the editor and Media Library: site-wide design changes via natural language, content editing and translation, image generation and editing powered by Google’s Nano Banana models, and @ai integration directly in the block notes collaboration workflow. Available on Business and Commerce plans, opt-in, no extra cost.
Next up for Automattic (AI) is a lot of fun stuff coming to WooCommerce. We’ve been building the foundational AI pieces into the commerce layer and it’s almost time to start showing what that looks like for merchants. More on that soon.
Also worth a quick mention: Telex has some pretty impressive new functionality live in the app right now. We’ll be talking about it more in the coming weeks, but if you’ve been following along, worth poking around.
The through-line is infrastructure first, then product on top. OAuth -> MCP Adapter (which depends on Abilities API) -> Claude Connector -> Cowork Plugins -> AI Assistant. Each layer made the next one faster to ship. That’s the payoff of the building blocks strategy.
WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 drops on February 19th. The WP AI Client core merge is the next big milestone.