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 follow-through after the AI Experiments 0.2.0 release, progress on Abilities work targeting core consideration, and the need to tighten coordination ahead of the 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 milestone on February 19. The group also discussed review bandwidth, documentation gaps, and upcoming decision points for the broader AI community chat.

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.

The AI Experiments plugin v0.2.0 was released earlier this week.

• The release announcement post is ready and awaiting a final +1 before publishing.
• The current iteration of the Abilities Explorer is included in v0.2.0.
• Looking ahead to v0.3.0, the group discussed refactoring the Abilities Explorer to TypeScript and exploring tighter integration with Data Views and Forms.
• @dkotter noted that several experiment UIUI UI is an acronym for User Interface - the layout of the page the user interacts with. Think ‘how are they doing that’ and less about what they are doing. items planned for v0.3.0 are awaiting review feedback from @jason_the_adams.

There was shared agreement that the 0.2.0 cycle took longer than intended, and that improving release cadence and review velocity remains a priority.

Abilities Work

@jorgefilipecosta provided an update on Abilities work targeting WordPress core:

• Feedback and reviews on the Settings are nearly complete, and the work is close to being ready for merge.
• Feedback and reviews on the Core Post Management Abilities PR is still underway.
• After wrapping that effort, @jorgefilipecosta plans to propose a follow-up PR to continue expanding the Abilities surface area.
• There was continued discussion around structuring abilities in a more granular way, including per–post type abilities, to allow greater flexibility and extensibility.

The group also reaffirmed the importance of clearly positioning Abilities as part of the AI component in core, to ensure related tickets are visible to the AI team and triaged appropriately.

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 that the PHP AI Client v0.4.0 has been released.

Next steps include:

• Introducing integration tests in the PHP AI Client to catch issues earlier, informed by recent bug reports.
• Shifting focus to upcoming WordPress AI Client updates.
• Continuing preparation for publishing the AI client merge proposal and associated PRs, to allow sufficient discussion within core ahead of the Beta 1 deadline.

There was consensus that these proposals need to land soon to avoid being blocked by the February 19 timeline.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

@ovidiu-galatan shared updates on MCP-related work:

• Several PRs are open on 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. to implement the PHP MCP schema.
• While the work is progressing, review bandwidth remains the primary bottleneck.
• Contributors were encouraged to help review where possible to move the adapter forward.

The group reiterated that the MCP Adapter is expected to remain a canonical 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, separate from the WordPress AI Client being considered for core.

Tooling, Documentation, and Upcoming Decision Points

Additional topics discussed included:

• WP Bench: @raftaar1191 successfully tested WP Bench using Ollama Cloud, noting that while results were poor compared to hosted providers, the tool functioned as expected. The group agreed this would be a good topic for the next 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/.-based AI community chat.
• Meeting timing: There is ongoing confusion around whether weekly and bi-weekly calls occur at 1600 or 1700 UTC. @jeffpaul will confirm and update the calendar to resolve this.
• Documentation gaps: @jeffpaul committed to reviewing the AI component and TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. handbook pages to ensure Abilities are clearly documented as part of the AI component, helping core triagers route issues correctly.

Next steps

• @jeffpaul will publish the AI Experiments v0.2.0 announcement post and outstanding meeting summaries.
• @jorgefilipecosta will finalize testing on the Core Post Management Abilities PR, notify @justlevine when ready for another review pass, and prepare a follow-up abilities PR.
• @jason_the_adams and @flixos90 will continue coordinating on AI client releases and the core merge proposal.
• @jeffpaul will confirm and update the correct meeting times for weekly and bi-weekly calls.
• Contributors are encouraged to review MCP Adapter PRs and help test available drafts.
• WP Bench and the February 19 Beta 1 milestone will be key topics for the upcoming community Slack chat.

Upcoming meetings

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

• The next bi-weekly AI Team Chat Slack discussion is scheduled for 5 February 2026.
• The next weekly AI Contributor weekly Google Meet video call is scheduled for 28 January 2026.

Props to @justlevine for pre-publish review.

#core-ai, #summary