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Using the WordPress AI Client

If you’re building a WordPress plugin or theme, you may not need to call the AI API directly. WordPress 7.0 ships a built-in AI Client with a fluent PHP API for text, image, and speech generation, and the WP Engine AI Connector plugin registers a wpengine provider for it — so your code never touches an API key, and auth, retries, and provider routing are handled for you.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  1. Install and activate the WP Engine AI Connector plugin.
  2. From Settings → WP Engine AI Connector, connect the site to a AI console project.
  3. In your plugin or theme, depend on the WordPress AI Client (bundled with WordPress 7.0+; install via Composer on earlier versions).

What it looks like

Section titled “What it looks like”

Generate text with the fluent builder. The SDK discovers a suitable model from the registered providers, sends the request through the connector, and returns the candidate text.

<?php
declare( strict_types = 1 );


use WordPress\AiClient\AiClient;


$summary = AiClient::prompt( 'Summarise the speed of light in one sentence.' )
    ->usingSystemInstruction( 'You are concise.' )
    ->usingTemperature( 0.2 )
    ->generateText();

generateText() returns a plain string. For multiple candidates or the full result object (token usage, finish reason, etc.) use generateTexts() or generateTextResult() respectively.

Pin a specific model when you need one for cost, latency, or capability reasons — the SDK falls through the list until it finds one the connector exposes:

$summary = AiClient::prompt( 'Summarise the speed of light in one sentence.' )
    ->usingProvider( 'wpengine' )
    ->usingModelPreference( 'google/gemini-3.5-flash' )
    ->generateText();

The connector reports itself as unavailable when the site isn’t connected. Gate user-facing features on that signal so a disconnected site degrades gracefully instead of throwing:

if ( ! AiClient::isConfigured( 'wpengine' ) ) {
    // Show an admin notice or fall back to a non-AI code path.
    return;
}

Swap generateText() for generateImage() to produce an image instead. The SDK returns a File object — handle it as a stream and write it through WordPress’s media APIs if you intend to persist it.

use WordPress\AiClient\AiClient;
use WordPress\AiClient\Files\DTO\File;


$image = AiClient::prompt( 'A pixel-art lighthouse at sunset' )
    ->usingProvider( 'wpengine' )
    ->generateImage();


// $image is a WordPress\AiClient\Files\DTO\File — persist or stream it.

What it doesn’t cover

Section titled “What it doesn’t cover”

The AI Client is a provider-agnostic content-generation layer, not a full AI API client. It’s built to work against any registered AI provider, so it only exposes generation primitives generic enough to make sense across providers — it has no method surface for:

  • Token counting, transcription, image alt-text, content summarization, or taxonomy suggestion
  • Usage analytics or credit balance
  • Site registration or connection management (handled entirely by the AI Connector plugin, not the SDK)
  • Agents, sessions, or knowledge base collections
  • The MCP transport used by external clients like Claude Code

For any of those, call the AI API directly — see the API reference for every operation.

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