As WordPress celebrated its 22nd birthday, Mary Hubbard announced the formation of the new WordPress AI Team. The team is set to drive and unify AI efforts across the WordPress ecosystem, fostering open innovation through collaboration, community values, and a plugin-first development approach.
The Purpose and Role of the New WordPress AI Team
With the advent of AI, how content is created and managed online has changed drastically, as Mary Hubbard highlighted, “ AI is already transforming how people create and manage content online. As this technology evolves, it’s essential that WordPress remains at the forefront, ensuring innovation happens in the open, guided by community values, and built to core standards.”
The team aims to thoughtfully unify AI development, aligning it with WordPress’s future vision, fostering collaboration and innovation across the ecosystem, and rapidly delivering value through a plugin-first approach that is independent of the Core release cycle.
The team will also focus on responsible AI development, share a public project roadmap, and collaborate with Core, Design, and Accessibility teams for smooth integration.
The Initial WordPress AI Team
The team has been launched with four contributors for now, and they are:
- James LePage – The founder of WPAI, which was acquired by Automattic earlier in 2025, following which he joined Automattic. He recently shared the OSS things to watch coming out of Automattic AI and stated, “ Quite early, but this stuff is growing into a suite of powerful tools to make WordPress ready for the AI-first web”.
- Felix Arntz – A senior software engineer at Google, and also a part of the WordPress Core and Performance teams. His initial experiment led to the “Speculative Loading” feature landing in WordPress 6.8.
- Pascal Birchler – A Developer Relations Engineer at Google, co-maintainer of WP-CLI. He is also working on an experimental plugin called WordPress Media Experiments and is part of the WordPress Core, Security, WP-CLI, and Performance teams.
- Jeff Paul – The Director of Open Source at 10up and a part of the WordPress Core, Security, and Performance Teams.
The post has also stated that, for now, James LePage and Felix Arntz will be the initial Team Reps, “ To help get things started, James and Felix will serve as the initial Team Reps in supporting team organization, communication, and coordination with other Make WordPress teams.”
The Core AI Team Blog is now live, and those interested can also join the #core-ai Slack channel.