WordPress 7.0 is in the home stretch, and the last AI Contributor meeting settled one question: the WordPress 7.0 AI features are past the experiment stage. Core is about to treat external model providers as a first-class concern. The run-up to RC1 brings the usual architectural friction with it, plus a few decisions filed under “ship it now, fix it later.”
The architecture of the AI off switch
The loudest argument right now is about how a site owner opts out. One camp wants a strict global constant, a hard off switch. The other wants a filter, since that is how WordPress does everything else. Filters are more flexible, but a constant is the only version a plugin cannot quietly override, and a privacy decision is not one I want a plugin voting on.
For now the plan is to merge a baseline for RC1 and keep the discussion going after. If you manage high-security client sites, the two implementations are worth telling apart:
<?php
/**
* The strict constant approach (Hard Switch)
*/
define( 'WP_AI_DISABLED', true );
/**
* The flexible filter approach (Soft Switch)
* Warning: Other plugins can override this!
*/
add_filter( 'wp_ai_enabled', '__return_false', 999 );
MCP and getting it stable
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the other big thread. I have covered standardizing AI connectors before, and the open question now is whether the MCP adapter ships as a standalone package or gets bundled. With AI going user-facing in 7.0, the infrastructure under it has to hold, which is why stabilizing the codebase before RC1 is the priority for contributors like @ovidiuiulian.
Image editing moves to core
Image Editing has been promoted from experiment to a core feature for the 7.0 cycle, which puts AI-assisted cropping and editing in the media library. Early builds have a track record here. We have already watched AI features trigger fatal errors, so version 0.6.0 of the AI Experiments plugin is worth testing early.
On the design side, the new “WordPress in bits” banner is getting pushback. Some contributors think the floating elements read as WordPress falling apart. The feedback sits on Trac ticket #64711 if you want to weigh in before the design is locked.
If these WordPress 7.0 AI features are eating your dev hours, hand it over to me. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Where the RC1 push stands
- Global constant: expected in RC1, for a full AI opt-out.
- MCP adapter: version 0.5.0 is meant to stabilize the model bridge.
- Open source models: the initial screen still lists no local LLM providers such as Ollama, which remains a concern.
The merge is worth watching. How well 7.0 lands depends less on the AI features than on whether the off switch turns out to be as reliable as they are.
