WordPress 7.0 dropped on 20 May 2026 and the internet is calling it a ‘revolution’. Whilst it’s not entirely wrong, it feels very sensationalist — and it’s missing something more important.
The headline feature is a built-in AI layer. WordPress can now connect directly to AI services like ChatGPT or Claude, and once it’s set up, your site starts to become a lot more capable. We’re talking drafting blog posts from inside the dashboard, generating image descriptions automatically, suggesting edits to existing content, and controlling exactly who on your team can do what with it. An editor can draft, a contributor can suggest, an admin controls the lot. For businesses managing content across a team, that is incredibly useful.
But the hype is skipping over something else.
The cost problem nobody is talking about
Those AI connections aren’t free. Far from it. Every time your site uses them, it’s burning through something called tokens — think of it like a taxi meter running in the background every time you use it. Most people won’t even be aware until the bill lands.
Because multiple plugins can all be drawing from the same connection without you realising, the costs can add up fast without a single obvious place to see why. There’s also a security angle: the credentials that connect your site to these AI services are essentially keys to a live billing account, and researchers flagged within 48 hours of launch that they’re already being targeted.
None of this means avoid it. It means go in with your eyes open.
The thing most coverage has missed
Alongside everything in WordPress 7, the WordPress.org contributor community have been quietly developing something far more powerful to most AI users. It’s called an MCP — Model Context Protocol — and it completely flips the approach on its head.
Rather than your website reaching out to an AI tool, you use the AI tool you already have — Claude, ChatGPT, whatever you work with day to day — and connect it directly to your site. The AI comes to WordPress, not the other way around.
What can it actually do? That’s where it gets interesting, because you decide. The MCP works through something called abilities — individual actions that you explicitly grant to AI. Draft and schedule a post. Update a page. Organise media. Handle comments. Each one is a permission you switch on or off, which means you’re never handing over the keys to the whole site. You give AI exactly as much access as makes sense for your business, nothing more.
This is bigger than your website
The same approach doesn’t stop at WordPress. The same technology can connect AI to your inbox, your documents, your CRM, your calendar, your project management tools. A developer can configure this for your specific business and your specific tools, so that AI is doing something genuinely useful rather than just sitting inside a settings panel you’ll visit once and forget about.
It’s not another subscription. It’s not a product you buy. It’s a set of connections that gets built around how you actually work.
That’s the difference between AI that writes content for your site and AI that works across your entire business.
One important note before you update
If you’re on WordPress, please sit tight before updating or using the AI capabilities launched with 7.0, and let the first round of fixes come in. Make sure your plugins are confirmed compatible too.
The MCP, whilst still in an early development cycle, can be used now. It doesn’t have a huge array of abilities just yet, but there are third party plugins — and even your own custom AI plugins — which can easily unlock more.
If you want to understand what this could look like for your specific setup, that’s exactly the kind of thing we help businesses with at Retina Digital. The starting point is usually simpler than people expect.
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