WordPress Puts AI in Core as the WP Engine Case Heads Toward Trial

WordPress spent the past year shipping its most AI-forward releases yet while fighting a very public legal battle. In late September 2026, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin let WP Engine's antitrust claims against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg go forward, even as WordPress 7.0 put a provider-agnostic AI layer into core.

From 6.9 to 7.0: a year of releases

WordPress 6.9 was scheduled for December 2, 2025. Its headline developer feature was the Abilities API, a central registry where core, themes and plugins declare callable functions. Notes, the renamed block-level commenting, arrived alongside new Accordion, Math and Time-to-Read blocks and updates to the Interactivity API.

WordPress 7.0 "Armstrong" slipped from an April 9 target and landed May 20, 2026. Real-time collaboration, the marquee feature, was cut on May 8 over stability and server-load concerns; Mullenweg said he was not confident the approach was robust enough for core. It remains testable in the Gutenberg plugin. Several previewed blocks, including Tabs, Slider and Table of Contents, also missed the release.

Other 7.0 changes are quieter but practical: Visual Revisions with a slider that color-codes additions and removals, email notifications for @mentions in Notes, a command palette across the whole admin, a Fonts screen, and a minimum PHP version of 7.4. Hosts that still run PHP 7.2 or 7.3 can no longer update.

How AI sits in core

Seven-point-oh adds an AI Client, an expanded Abilities API and a Settings > Connectors screen. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are default providers, and the features are opt-in. The design splits the work: plugins and themes register what the site can do as abilities, and the client routes requests to whichever model the site owner connects. That is the same shape as MCP-style tool exposure, which is why agents can now plausibly operate a WordPress site without bespoke plugins.

The WP Engine fight, still unresolved

Search Engine Journal reported on September 28 that the court denied dismissal of WP Engine's monopolization, attempted monopolization and two illegal-tying claims, plus its claims against WooCommerce. A computer-extortion claim was dismissed. All seven of Automattic's counterclaims survived at least in part, with partial dismissal of a false-advertising counterclaim and several trademark ones. Neither side has won or settled, and coverage disagrees on whether trial is set for 2027, so treat any date as unconfirmed.

The stakes extend past the two companies. WP Engine is one of the largest managed WordPress hosts, and the case tests whether control over the WordPress.org plugin and update infrastructure, and over the trademark, can be used against a commercial competitor. Hosts, agencies and plugin vendors have been watching closely, because a ruling either way would change how much risk they carry when they build businesses on a project that one company's founder effectively steers.

Share: still dominant, quietly eroding

W3Techs on November 3, 2026 shows WordPress on 39.5% of all websites and 58.2% of sites with a detectable CMS. Secondary coverage puts the latter figure near 62% at the start of 2025 and 58.8% on September 13, 2026. A third of the web uses no monitored CMS at all, so much of the drop is not a clean handoff to rivals.

What to watch

• Whether real-time collaboration returns in a later core release.
• The next procedural steps and any trial schedule in the Northern District of California.
• How many plugins register abilities, which decides whether the AI layer is useful in practice.
• Whether the slide below 58% continues.

Sources

1. WordPress 7.0 'Armstrong': What's New, What Changed, and What Got Cut — DreamHost
2. Automattic, Matt Mullenweg Fail to Dismiss WP Engine Antitrust Claims — Search Engine Journal
3. Usage statistics of content management systems — W3Techs
4. Everything You Need to Know About WordPress 6.9 Update — Bluehost
5. WordPress 7.0 release postponed — WordPress VIP