This week’s story is AI moving in both directions at once. A researcher used an AI model to find WordPress’s worst unauthenticated flaw in years, WordPress patched it, and attackers built a working exploit within 90 minutes of the fix going out. Meanwhile WordPress 7.1 keeps moving toward its August 19 release, Gutenberg graduated two long-requested blocks, and WordPress’s official AI plugin picked up a comment-reply assistant.

Security: AI found WordPress’s worst flaw in a decade, then attackers used it

WordPress shipped an emergency security release, 7.0.2, on July 17 after a critical flaw turned up that let an anonymous attacker take over a plain WordPress install with no plugins. Two bugs, a SQL injection in WP_Query and a REST API validation bypass, chain together to skip authentication entirely. If you haven’t confirmed your site reads 7.0.2, 6.9.5, or 6.8.6, check now. Read the full breakdown.

The flaw, since named wp2shell, has an unusual origin story. Security researcher Adam Kues found the entire exploit chain using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra model in about 10 hours, for roughly $25 in compute. WPWithin covered how he did it: a stripped-down copy of WordPress core, hours of aggressive automated searching, and a six-step exploit chain that took Kues longer to understand than the model took to write.

Attackers didn’t wait long either. Patchstack logged the first real exploitation attempts about 90 minutes after WordPress 7.0.2 shipped, and has since counted more than 65,000 attempts from over 1,500 IP addresses, all against sites that hadn’t updated yet. The full attack timeline shows how fast a patch turns into a target once it’s public.

The same AI shift is showing up on the defense side too. Wordfence says PRISM, the AI system it added to its bug bounty program three months ago, has found 202 vulnerabilities and is now its highest-output researcher, ahead of every human contributor. Read more about PRISM. Faster AI-assisted discovery cuts both ways, for defenders and attackers, so keeping auto-updates switched on matters more than ever.

WordPress 7.1: A feature dropped, a beta shipped, images move to the browser

WordPress 7.1 Beta 3 shipped this week, and the headline change is a feature getting pulled rather than added. Unicode email address support, which would have let people register and log in with non-ASCII addresses, has been pulled from core after testing turned up real problems, including failed password resets. Co-founder Matt Mullenweg cited “the vast surface area Unicode introduces” as a security concern; development continues in a community plugin instead. Beta 3 also fixes more than 71 other bugs, including GIF uploads that used to hang and duplicate HEIC entries in Safari. Read the full Beta 3 rundown. The first release candidate is due August 5, with 7.1 itself landing August 19.

Two other 7.1 changes are worth knowing about before then. The Media Library switches to infinite scrolling by default, replacing the “Load more” button; switch it back off from your profile page if you’d rather click through pages. And image uploads move out of your server and into the visitor’s browser, using WebAssembly to resize and convert photos before they reach you. WordPress.org says the change also produces roughly 15% smaller JPEGs with no visible quality loss. See what it means for your site.

Block Editor: Two experimental blocks graduate

Gutenberg 23.6 makes the Playlist and Tabs blocks a permanent part of the block library, so you no longer need an experimental features flag to use them. The Playlist block plays a list of audio tracks with artwork and a waveform display; the Tabs block organizes content into accessible, clickable tabbed sections. See what else shipped in 23.6, including threaded Notes mentions and a Gallery block that can auto-show every image on a post. Gutenberg 23.6 requires WordPress 6.9 or later.

AI: A comment-reply assistant, and a bigger stage at WordCamp US

WordPress’s official AI plugin reached version 1.2.0 this week with Suggest Reply, a tool that drafts comment replies for a moderator to review and edit before posting; nothing publishes automatically. Read about 1.2.0, which also adds bulk content summaries and two new read-only Abilities for AI agents.

AI is dominating the agenda at WordCamp US 2026 too. Organizers published the full schedule this week, and AI now fills at least 18 sessions across the four-day event in Phoenix, covering agentic development, guardrails for AI-assisted coding, and the legal side of AI adoption under the EU AI Act. The conference runs August 16 to 19, overlapping with WordPress 7.1’s release.

Community: A nonprofit rebrands, and a four-year-old data fight resurfaces

The WP Community Collective has rebranded as The WP Open Community Collective after its board found that the WordPress Foundation had filed a pending US trademark application covering the acronym “WPCC,” used for the Foundation’s WordPress Campus Connect education program. The nonprofit says no dispute was raised with it directly; it changed its name and moved to thewpocc.org as a proactive step rather than wait for a conflict to surface. Only the branding changed; the organization’s legal name, mission, and leadership stay the same.

Separately, a four-year fight over plugin data resurfaced. WordPress.org removed public charts showing whether a plugin’s install base was growing or shrinking back in 2022, citing data quality concerns at the time. Matt Mullenweg commented on the long-running Trac ticket for the first time since 2022, citing “competing interests” between commercial and community plugins, without committing to restoring the data. Plugin developers on the ticket, including former Automattic contributor Mark Riley, argue that WordPress.org already collects this data and should share it back with the developers whose plugins generate it. There’s no resolution yet, but if you maintain a plugin, this is the ticket to watch.

The WordPress Playground team is also calling for testers on a redesigned interface that replaces its sidebar with a bottom dock, aimed at making the tool’s persistent-site features, in place since March, easier to find. Try the new UI if you use Playground for testing or client demos.

End of article