WordPress 6.9 beta ships the server-side half of the Abilities API. You can register and retrieve abilities in PHP, but the client-side JavaScript moved to the Gutenberg repo, so there is no native AI interface in the editor yet.
Nobody checks whether $wpdb exists before running a query. The AI team wants models treated the same way in WordPress, with hosts providing the model and developers registering Abilities instead of wiring up API keys.
Custom REST endpoints leave AI agents guessing. The MCP Adapter v0.3.0 turns registered WordPress abilities into tools an agent can discover, and logs the calls.
A client built a business site in twenty minutes with an AI prototyping tool. It looked great and could not talk to his inventory system or be crawled properly. Here is where AI website building stops and production work starts.
A client’s plugin came back rejected three times and he blamed the reviewer. The review is largely automated now: more than 220 checks, AI screening plugin names for trademarks, and the Plugin Check tool expected to run before you submit.
I almost sold a client a custom Python bridge between OpenAI and WordPress, then State of the Word 2025 made it pointless. Notes on what the Abilities API and the WP AI Client actually change for developers and site owners.
A store was throwing random 500 errors at checkout because a deleted flash-sale product was still sitting in customer carts. WooCommerce 10.3.6 fixes that class of crash, along with a PHP 8.4 failure in the Helper updater.
A law firm got a WordPress site out of an AI builder in ten minutes, then came back two weeks later with a broken contact form and no search traffic. How I treat AI output as scaffolding instead of a finished build.
A client’s admin was three AI plugins deep, each with its own API key and settings page. The AI Experiments plugin v0.1.0 offers a registry and a base class instead, so features get built once against a standard API.
I wired a client’s store straight into one AI provider and regretted it two weeks later. The Abilities API and the WP AI Client give you a way to register tools and send prompts in WordPress without hardcoding a model.