The formerly named “CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-AI Contributor Check-in” from 2025 reconvened today as the “AI Contributor weekly meeting” in 2026 as a weekly video chat for contributors to discuss progress and milestones across the projects maintained by the WordPress AI team. Folks are welcome to join on Wednesday’s at 1700 UTC via Google Meet with in-meeting notes captured in a Slack Canvas and then paired with Gemini meeting notes to help generate this meeting summary post.

This week’s AI contributor meeting focused on wrapping up the AI Experiments plugin 0.2.0 milestone, unblocking progress on Abilities work, and continuing coordination toward potential AI client inclusion in WordPress 7.0. The group also discussed improving review velocity and establishing a more predictable release cadence going forward.

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. (v0.2.0)

@jeffpaul and @dkotter reviewed the remaining items in the 0.2.0 milestone earlier this week. Several PRs have already been merged, with a small number of stragglers being wrapped up or deferred to 0.3.0.

• @jeffpaul is preparing the 0.2.0 release with the goal of shipping imminently.
• A Make/AI post announcing the release and highlighting new experiments is planned shortly after.
• Once 0.2.0 ships, the team will move into the next milestone, including deferred items and additional targeted experiments.
• There was agreement that release cadence needs to improve; @jeffpaul and @dkotter will likely establish a recurring UAT, merge, and release rhythm (potentially UAT bi-weekly, release monthly) to prevent future milestones from dragging on.

Abilities and Abilities Explorer

Abilities work remains an active area of focus, with several parallel threads:

• The Abilities Explorer PR, originally authored by @karmatosed, is close to ready but has been stalled due to review bandwidth.
• @justlevine has been leading updates but has been dealing with illness; @dkotter offered to review and test the Abilities Explorer once he finishes remaining 0.2.0 work.
• @jorgefilipecosta shared a proposal and PR for Core Post Management Abilities, intended both as a concrete feature and as an example of how third-party plugins could implement richer, schema-driven abilities.
• The group discussed versioning and deprecation strategies for abilities, with @jason_the_adams encouraging contributors to engage on the existing track ticket and align on a forward-compatible approach.

There was also discussion around polymorphic abilities versus post-type-specific abilities, with interest in a layered approach that supports both generic, low-level abilities and more specialized ones where appropriate.

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 and WordPress AI Client

@jason_the_adams shared updates on the AI client work:

• The PHP AI client v0.4.0 is expected to ship soon, followed by a new release of the WordPress AI client.
• @flixos90 will research and outline a proposal for bringing the WordPress AI client (and its PHP dependency) into core, potentially bundling the PHP client similarly to the Requests library.
• The WordPress AI client will likely be broken into smaller, focused PRs for core (for example, prompt building and settings handled separately).
• Streaming support will be removed from the PHP client for now due to technical and hosting constraints.
• Providers will not ship in core initially; instead, they will live in separate plugins, with a “kill switch” 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. planned to allow sites to disable AI functionality entirely or conditionally.

@isotropic offered to draft the Make/Core proposal post to support the core inclusion effort and help manage review load.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

@jason_the_adams shared updates on MCP-related work:

• @ovidiu-galatan has opened a series of PRs updating the MCP adapterMCP Adapter Translates WordPress abilities into Model Context Protocol format, allowing AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to discover and invoke WordPress capabilities as tools, resources, and prompts., including schema-to-PHP class generation.
• Several PRs remain open and are in need of review to move the effort forward.

Next steps

• @jeffpaul will finalize and ship the AI Experiments plugin 0.2.0 release and publish a Make/AI announcement post.
• @dkotter will review and test the Abilities Explorer after finishing remaining 0.2.0 reviews.
• @jason_the_adams will post an update on abilities versioning and deprecation and continue coordinating AI client releases with @flixos90.
• @isotropic will draft the Make/Core proposal post for AI client inclusion.
• Contributors are encouraged to help review MCP PRs and test the latest Experiments pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party ahead of upcoming core discussions.

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 22 January 2026.
• The next weekly AI Contributor weekly Google Meet video call is scheduled for 22 January 2026.

Props to @justlevine for pre-publish review.

#core-ai, #summary