How WordPress Is Building AI Into the Open Web
At the State of the Word 2025 event, the WordPress team unveiled an ambitious vision for AI integration within the platform. With the release of WordPress 6.9, the open-source project shipped four foundational AI components designed to power intelligent, adaptable websites across the ecosystem. These tools aren’t flashy add-ons—they’re infrastructure, enabling AI-powered features for hundreds of millions of sites.
The announcement marked a pivotal moment: WordPress is not just a content management system anymore—it’s a platform preparing for an AI-native future, where intelligent assistants, agentic tools, and automated workflows interact directly with websites.
The Formation of the Core AI Team
Building Foundational AI, Not Just Features
About six months before the release, WordPress formed its first dedicated Core AI team, co-led by the author alongside their AI initiatives at Automattic. The team’s mission was clear: to integrate foundational AI capabilities into WordPress itself. These capabilities would serve as building blocks for developers, plugin creators, and users to safely and effectively leverage AI.
In June, the team published a strategy document called “AI Building Blocks”, outlining four core components that would make AI integration possible. By December, all four were successfully shipped in WordPress 6.9, demonstrating the team’s focus on layered architecture, abstraction, and community-driven collaboration.
The author emphasized the intensity of the past six months, noting that “one month in AI is like a year in normal development time.” With technologies like GPT-5-level models and browser-native AI rapidly emerging, WordPress built for flexibility rather than prediction, ensuring the platform can adapt to whatever the AI landscape becomes.
The Four AI Building Blocks in WordPress 6.9
1. The Abilities API: A Universal AI Interface
The Abilities API provides a unified registry of what can be done on a WordPress site. It’s a framework that allows AI systems to understand site capabilities, actions, and constraints. Developers and AI agents can leverage this API to perform tasks automatically, creating a bridge between machine reasoning and human-designed workflows.
The author drew a personal connection to this component, highlighting its origins in earlier AI experiments. For developers, the Abilities API represents a new kind of contract between plugins and AI agents, allowing non-human systems to interpret and act on site functionality safely.
2. The WP AI Client: Provider-Agnostic AI Integration
The WP AI Client acts as a bridge to any large language model (LLM), whether OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or local models. Site owners choose the provider, while developers can build features without worrying about compatibility issues.
This standardization simplifies AI experimentation, enabling developers to build robust AI experiences for content creation, analytics, accessibility, and user engagement. The client also lays the groundwork for future AI-enabled plugins and features, making AI a universal layer of WordPress functionality.
3. MCP Adapter: Exposing Abilities to External AI Services
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) Adapter exposes WordPress site capabilities to external AI services. This adapter pattern ensures that if protocols evolve, the underlying logic remains intact. Early implementations are already live on WordPress.com and WooCommerce, allowing AI agents to interact intelligently with sites rather than simply scraping content.
4. The AI Experiments Plugin: Reference Implementation
Finally, the AI Experiments Plugin ties the system together. It demonstrates real-world AI use cases, providing a reference for developers and practical features for users. From accessibility checks to content suggestions, it serves as a playground for experimentation while showcasing the power and flexibility of AI in WordPress.
Why This Matters for Developers and Users
Empowering Humans, Not Replacing Them
One of the key messages from the author is that WordPress AI integration focuses on empowerment over replacement. AI tools are designed to assist, streamline, and enhance workflows—not replace human creativity. Features like collaborative editing now support AI agents alongside human collaborators, ensuring that content creation remains both intelligent and human-centered.
The architecture allows AI to act as a co-creator, reviewing accessibility, suggesting improvements, and automating routine tasks, while humans retain final control. This vision aligns with WordPress’s ethos of open web, user empowerment, and extensibility.
Preparing for an AI-Mediated Web
Content Is More Valuable Than Ever
The author emphasizes that AI relies on human-generated content to function effectively. Rather than replacing content creators, AI amplifies the value of the open web. High-quality, structured, and accessible content allows AI systems to provide better recommendations, support intelligent agents, and deliver personalized experiences.
By building AI tools into WordPress itself, the platform ensures that the next wave of AI interaction—from browser-based agents to automated workflows—will leverage the open web rather than closed, proprietary silos.
Looking Ahead to WordPress 7.0
Completing AI Integration Across the Stack
WordPress 7.0 will introduce client-side Abilities API coverage and a new Workflows API, enabling complex sequences of automated actions. These additions will allow users and AI agents to:
- Chain multiple actions together (e.g., order processing, notifications, inventory updates)
- Trigger conditional workflows intelligently
- Interact with AI-powered plugins and external services seamlessly
Combined with the WP AI Client, this sets the stage for AI to become a universal, interoperable layer within WordPress, democratizing access and capabilities across all sites.
WordPress 6.9 and Open-Source AI
WordPress 6.9 represents a turning point in open-source AI integration. By building infrastructure like the Abilities API, WP AI Client, MCP Adapter, and AI Experiments Plugin, the platform empowers developers, hosts, and users to interact with AI safely and creatively.
As the web continues to evolve, WordPress positions itself as a central hub for the AI-enabled open web, ensuring that sites remain adaptable, user-focused, and future-ready. For businesses, creators, and developers, this is more than a software update—it’s an invitation to participate in shaping the next twenty years of the open web.
