WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 is officially four weeks away, and the AI roadmap is hitting a critical stage. I’ve seen plenty of core releases feel like a mad dash, but the coordination happening within the AI Contributor group suggests we’re moving past “experimental” and toward something foundational. This week’s meeting centered on the WordPress 7.0 AI features and the tooling required to make them stable enough for production environments.
The WP AI Client: A Core Integration Strategy
The team is currently finalizing the merge proposal for the WP AI Client. Specifically, the integration approach for the PHP AI Client v0.4.0 is being modeled after how the Requests library was brought into core. For those of us who remember the legacy WP_Http struggles, this is a relief. It suggests a cleaner, library-first approach rather than a collection of scattered global functions.
Furthermore, a forthcoming PR will introduce a filter to control user access to running AI prompts. This is a crucial addition for site administrators who need to manage cost and security. As I discussed in my previous look at the WordPress PHP AI Client SDK, having granular control over the context of these prompts is the only way to scale AI in a multi-user environment.
Abilities API and Granular Permissions
The “Abilities API” is intended to ship its client-side JS counterpart in 7.0. The goal is to allow AI to interact with settings, users, and post management. However, as any senior dev knows, giving an LLM access to delete_user or update_option is a security race condition waiting to happen. The team is wisely exploring a filtering system to limit access by user and context.
/**
* bbioon_ai_user_access_filter
* Filter to control user access to running AI prompts.
* This reflects the forthcoming PR mentioned in the weekly summary.
*/
add_filter( 'bbioon_ai_user_can_run_prompts', function( $can_run, $user_id, $context ) {
// Specifically limit AI prompts to editors in the post-editor context.
if ( 'post-editor' === $context && ! user_can( $user_id, 'edit_others_posts' ) ) {
return false;
}
return $can_run;
}, 10, 3 );Benchmarking the Future with WP Bench
One of the more interesting technical updates is WP Bench. It’s a Python-based tool designed to evaluate models against WordPress-specific challenges. We’ve reached the point where manual evaluation is a bottleneck. Systematic testing with tools like WP Bench or local testing via Ollama is how we ensure that WordPress 7.0 AI features don’t just work on a demo site, but actually handle the messy reality of legacy databases and custom hooks.
I’ve tracked the WordPress Core AI evolution since the early building blocks, and the move toward observability (tracing with LangSmith or Langfuse) is the final piece of the puzzle. We need to see what the models are doing in real-time to debug why a post-management ability failed to fire correctly.
Look, if this WordPress 7.0 AI features stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Key Takeaways for the 7.0 Milestone
- Deadline: Beta 1 lands February 19th. That is only four weeks away.
- Security: New filters will allow site admins to limit AI access by context and user role.
- Architecture: The PHP AI Client will likely follow the
Requestslibrary pattern for core integration. - Tooling: WP Bench is becoming the standard for evaluating model performance in a WordPress context.
For more official updates, keep an eye on the Make/Core 7.0 roadmap and the latest AI vision posts from the team.
