The AI Contributor weekly meeting reconvened today (Slack archive) to discuss progress, upcoming milestones, and coordination efforts across the projects maintained by the WordPress AI team. This meeting focused on preparation for WordPress 7.0 BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 and tooling improvements for the team.

WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 preparation and timelines

@jeffpaul opened the meeting by reminding the team that WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 is just four weeks away (February 19th). This timeline constraint was emphasized throughout the discussion as a key factor for planning and decision-making.

Key items identified for the 7.0 milestone:

• WP AI Client: a PR or a set of PRs need to be prepared, paired with a merge proposal post on Make/CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.
• Abilities APIAbilities API A core WordPress API (introduced in 6.9) that creates a central registry of capabilities, making WordPress functions discoverable and accessible to AI agents, automation tools, and developers. Transforms WordPress from isolated functions into a unified system.: The client-side JS counterpart is intended to ship as part of 7.0
• Additional core abilities: @jorgefilipecosta expressed hope to include settings management and user management abilities, with post management abilities also under consideration
• Versionless AbilityAbility A registered, self-documenting unit of WordPress functionality that can be discovered and invoked through multiple contexts (REST API, Command Palette, MCP). Includes authorization and input/output specifications. Deprecation: @justlevine advocated for including versionless deprecation and a querying APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. in 7.0, acknowledging the time constraints

Regarding GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ workflows, @jorgefilipecosta clarified that they remain in early exploratory stages and will not impact the AI team’s efforts. Once shipped, they will simply be another consumer of abilities, with no expected major impact on AI initiatives. The potential for hybrid abilities was acknowledged but remains on hold pending a concrete use case.

WP AI Client updates

@jason_the_adams provided an update on the WP AI Client roadmap:

• Integrating PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/preface.php. AI Client v0.4.0 into the WP AI Client
• Planning PHP AI Client v0.4.1 to address a bug before the 7.0 milestone
• @flixos90 is exploring the best approach to include PHP AI Client in core, similar to how the Requests library is integrated
• @flixos90 will circle back with details on the integration approach
• @jason_the_adams mentioned a forthcoming PR that will add a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. to control user access to running AI prompts, allowing site administrators to limit access by user, context, and other criteria
• @isotropic to write the merge proposal for the WP AI Client inclusion in WordPress 7.0.

WP Bench and benchmarking tooling

@jeffpaul introduced discussion around WP Bench, an AI benchmarking tool developed by the team. @jason_the_adams provided an overview:

• WP Bench evaluates various language models against WordPress-specific challenges, providing metrics on model performance in terms of WordPress knowledge and code execution
• The goal is to motivate AI providers to improve their models for WordPress contexts, while also helping AI consumers select the right model for specific WordPress tasks
• The tool is written in Python, with dataset tests defined in JSONJSON JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a minimal, readable format for structuring data. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. format for easy contribution
• Contribution is welcome, particularly in building out additional tests and datasets

@johnbillion and @raftaar1191 explored the operational aspects:

• @johnbillion asked whether WP Bench is running anywhere where results can be publicly viewed, or if it’s primarily a local-first tool; @shadyvb shared a test run for inspection
• @raftaar1191 offered to update the WP Bench documentation to clarify that it can be tested locally, particularly with Ollama, and to ensure users understand how to run it on their local machines

Observability, tracing, and evaluation

Several contributors raised questions about observability and evaluation methodologies:

• @justlevine asked whether there has been discussion about using WP Bench to evaluate changes to AGENTS.md or prompts in the AI Experiments pluginAI Experiments Plugin WordPress's AI laboratory bringing all building blocks together. Serves as both a user tool and developer reference implementation. First release (v0.1.0) includes Title Generation experiment.
• @jorgefilipecosta suggested that WP Bench could be used to evaluate AGENTS.md changes by running benchmarks and measuring score improvements
• @shadyvb inquired about existing plans for supporting observability and tracing with tools like LangSmith or LangFuse

The group acknowledged that datasets are currently very limited, and current benchmark scores should be taken with a grain of salt. There was general agreement on the value of moving beyond manual evaluation and anecdotal experience toward more systematic testing approaches.

@jason_the_adams noted that the PHP AI Client is experimenting with integration tests that run real prompts (https://github.com/WordPress/php-ai-client/pull/176), highlighting the difficulty of catching API edge cases through manual and unit testing alone. This work may have broader applications for the team’s testing strategy.

Given that integration tests require API keys, @jason_the_adams clarified that for now they are limiting execution to himself and @flixos90 running locally at their discretion before merging PRs or releasing, noting that there isn’t a precedent for WordPress storing API keys as GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ secrets for this type of automation.

Next steps

• @flixos90 will explore and report back on the best approach to include PHP AI Client into core, similar to the Requests library pattern
• @isotropic will write the WP AI Client merge proposal for Make/Core
• @raftaar1191 will update WP Bench documentation to include guidance on local testing, particularly with Ollama
• The team will continue inviting contributors to test the WP AI Client
• Discussion on versionless Ability Deprecation should continue toward consensus on a solution

Upcoming meetings

Reminder that all team meetings are published to https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/#ai.

• The next bi-weekly AI Team Chat SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. discussion is scheduled for 5 February 2026.
• The next weekly AI Contributor Google Meet video call is scheduled for 28 January 2026.

Props to @jeffpaul for reviewing this post.

#core-ai, #summary