I had a client last year—big site, tons of custom data. They wanted an AI assistant that didn’t just “answer questions” but could actually check stock, update a customer’s address, or even draft a blog post based on a voice memo. My first thought? No problem. I figured I’d just write a bunch of custom REST endpoints and hook them into a LangChain agent. Simple enough, right?
Total nightmare. It turns out, building a custom interface for an AI to interact with your database is like inviting a bull into a china shop and hoping it only touches the blue plates. I spent three weeks building a custom permissions layer just so the AI wouldn’t accidentally delete the entire product catalog. It worked… for about five minutes. Then the first plugin update broke the endpoint structure. I was chasing my tail. The real fix wasn’t more code; it was a better standard. That is where the WordPress Abilities API comes in.
Standardizing AI Actions with the WordPress Abilities API
This is exactly why the recent news from the #core-ai Slack channel is so important. In the bi-weekly meeting from October 16th, 2025, the team discussed the urgent progress of the Abilities API for the upcoming WordPress 6.9 release. This isn’t just another shiny toy. It is the foundation for what we call “agentic” behavior in the WordPress ecosystem. The goal is to let plugins register “abilities” in a way that AI agents can discover and use them safely, without us having to hard-code every single interaction.
According to the meeting notes I saw over at make.wordpress.org, the team is already locking down hooks for the MVP. This is crucial. It means we can maintain a plugin that provides bleeding-edge features between core releases. As someone who has been in the trenches for 14 years, I can tell you: if it’s not extensible, it’s dead on arrival. Trust me on this. The current meta system and *_args filters they are proposing are exactly what we need to keep things flexible while core catches up.
They also touched on the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Adapter. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will. It’s the bridge between WordPress and the actual AI models. By keeping the Abilities API focused on registering what a site can do and letting the adapter handle the filtering for the AI, the core team is avoiding the “feature creep” that usually kills new APIs. It’s clean. It’s pragmatic.
What Registering an Ability Actually Looks Like
Instead of building custom endpoints, we’ll be using a standardized registration process. This allows the AI to understand the context—what the function does, what arguments it needs, and what the permissions are. Here is a conceptual look at how we might register an ability to handle something like a product price update, keeping everything safely prefixed.
// Concept for registering an AI ability in WordPress 6.9
add_action( 'init', function() {
if ( function_exists( 'bbioon_register_ability' ) ) {
bbioon_register_ability( 'bbioon_update_product_price', [
'label' => __( 'Update Product Price', 'bbioon' ),
'description' => __( 'Updates the price of a WooCommerce product by ID.', 'bbioon' ),
'callback' => 'bbioon_handle_price_update',
'args' => [
'product_id' => [ 'type' => 'integer', 'required' => true ],
'new_price' => [ 'type' => 'number', 'required' => true ],
],
'capability' => 'edit_products',
]);
}
});
function bbioon_handle_price_update( $args ) {
$product_id = absint( $args['product_id'] );
$new_price = floatval( $args['new_price'] );
// Logic to update the product goes here
return [ 'success' => true, 'message' => 'Price updated.' ];
}The beauty here is the “philosophy” approach they are taking. By documenting the project’s beliefs—similar to how Tanstack does it—the team is ensuring that the Abilities API doesn’t just become a junk drawer for every experimental AI feature. It’s about building a robust, predictable framework. I’ve seen enough “experimental” code make its way into production only to cause a race condition during a high-traffic sale. We don’t want that here.
Why You Should Care About These Core AI Updates
If you’re running a high-end site or an agency, you can’t ignore this. The WordPress Abilities API is going to change how users interact with the backend. We’re moving away from clicking menus and toward intent-based management. But you have to do it right. You can’t just slap an AI on top of a mess and expect it to work.
- Standardization: No more custom-coded “black box” AI integrations.
- Security: Permissions are handled at the registration level, not as an afterthought.
- Discoverability: AI agents can query the API to see exactly what they are allowed to do.
- Future-proofing: Code written for the Abilities API now will actually work when 6.9 drops.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with the latest AI standards, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you ready to stop hard-coding your AI actions and start using a real API? Let’s get ahead of the curve before WordPress 6.9 becomes the new baseline.
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