Cloudflare made a Word Press for AI agents | The Verge
Overview
Tech Expand Amazon Apple Facebook Google Microsoft Samsung Business See all tech
Reviews Expand Smart Home Reviews Phone Reviews Tablet Reviews Headphone Reviews See all reviews
Details
Science Expand Space Energy Environment Health See all science
Entertainment Expand TV Shows Movies Audio See all entertainment
Policy Expand Antitrust Politics Law Security See all policy
Gadgets Expand Laptops Phones TVs Headphones Speakers Wearables See all gadgets
Verge Shopping Expand Buying Guides Deals Gift Guides See all shopping
Streaming Expand Disney HBONetflix You Tube Creators See all streaming
Transportation Expand Electric Cars Autonomous Cars Ride-sharing Scooters See all transportation
Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Web Close Web Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Web
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
The launch of Em Dash is shining a light on the Word Press project’s biggest problems.
The launch of Em Dash is shining a light on the Word Press project’s biggest problems.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Cloudflare, the cloud provider that connects millions of sites to the internet, wants to “fix” another digital giant: Word Press. It announced a new open-source system, called Em Dash, that’s supposed to address the “core problems that Word Press cannot solve” — and they want to do it by allowing AI agents to take control of your website.
Though it’s still in early access, Em Dash is already causing a stir in the Word Press community, and not just because its interface looks like Word Press with a facelift. Cloudflare is calling Em Dash the “spiritual successor” of Word Press — something Word Press founder Matt Mullenweg has already refuted in a blog post about the new platform. “Please don’t claim to be our spiritual successor without understanding our spirit,” Mullenweg writes. “I think Em Dash was created to sell more Cloudflare services.”
Other members of the Word Press community have jumped online to pick apart Em Dash as well, while also calling attention to ways that the Word Press project should be improved — especially when it comes to issues surrounding architecture, security, and AI adoption.
In its announcement, Cloudflare claims to have rebuilt the open-source Word Press project “from the ground up,” offering a built-in model context protocol (MCP) server, which allows large language models (LLMs) to connect and interact with the platform’s documentation. It runs on Astro, Cloudflare’s LLM-friendly web building framework, and uses Type Script, a programming language that AI agents can better understand. Em Dash even supports x 402, a tool that web publishers can use to make AI crawlers pay to access their content.
Brian Coords, a developer advocate at Word Press.com owner Automattic, notes that one of Em Dash’s strengths is in the speed at which you can set up a website, saying, “Getting from zero to a basic design is fast. I mean, really fast.”
But it “feels a bit vibe-coded,” Coords writes. Mullenweg echoes this, writing on his blog that the interface “is in the uncanny valley of being sorta-Word Press sorta-not,” adding that he knows “it wasn’t a weekend vibecode project, but it has some of that smell.” Mullenweg admits that Em Dash’s AI-powered skills feature is a nice touch, but he doesn’t get into the deeper issues holding Word Press back — something that other members of the community have been vocal about in light of Em Dash’s launch.
Joost de Valk, the creator of the popular Yoast Word Press plugin, calls Em Dash “the most interesting thing to happen to content management in years,” as it’s built to work with support for AI agents and comes with structured content that “machines can parse and manipulate easily.” In his post about Em Dash, de Valk brings up the structural issues with Word Press that the project continues to treat “as cosmetic.”
De Valk references a post from Word Press developer Hendrik Luehrsen, who writes that Em Dash “exposes an old weakness” in Word Press’s current editor, Gutenberg, which stores data in an HTML format. Luehrsen argues that this structure becomes a problem when developers have to rework content, process it through different interfaces, or move it into other systems.
“The real lesson is that content on the web now has to be thought about differently,” Luehrsen says. “As long as content is understood mainly as output, HTML as a storage format can still seem good enough. But once content moves into new contexts through APIs, multiple frontends, personalization, and AI systems, that logic no longer holds.”
But not everyone agrees with Cloudflare’s claim that Em Dash solves a “security crisis” surrounding Word Press plugins. Cloudflare cites data from Patchstack, which says “more high-severity vulnerabilities were discovered in the Word Press ecosystem in 2025 than in the previous two years combined.” As outlined by Cloudflare, Word Press plugins run PHP script that “hooks directly into Word Press to add or modify functionality,” meaning it theoretically has access to everything on your site. Instead, Em Dash plugins use something called Dynamic Workers — a tool that allows AI agents to execute code in their own isolated environment, shielding the rest of your site in case things go wrong.
Word Press’ new AI assistant will let users edit their sites with prompts
Meanwhile, Mullenweg says the fact that plugins “can change every aspect of your Word Press experience is a feature, not a bug.” De Valk pushes back on Mullenweg’s take, saying that it’s like “arguing that because some mobile apps need camera access, every app should get root access to the phone.” On his own blog, he says there’s an argument for a “granular permission system” within Word Press, not for “continuing to give every plugin the keys to the entire database.”
Em Dash is already trying to draw users from Word Press by making it easy to import sites from the platform. But, as noted by Wynne, if things go south, it doesn’t look like there’s a way to export your site from Em Dash and untangle a site from Cloudflare’s proprietary infrastructure. “There’s no intention that Cloudflare right now would abandon Em Dash, but it could at a later date. What would happen then if it’s abandoned?” Wynne tells The Verge.
While some Word Press members, including de Valk, say they’re going to build on Em Dash, concerns remain about whether Em Dash actually has the community to support new users. Word Press is backed by thousands of volunteers, along with developers at Automattic, to create new features for the platform. “When something breaks, there are forums, documentation, tutorials, and developers everywhere who know how to fix it,” Miriam Schwab, the head of Word Press at Elementor, writes. “Thanks to all these decades of content, contribution and usage, LLMs have all the knowledge needed to design, build and troubleshoot Word Press sites.”
“If Word Press starts making the right architectural decisions now, it can still catch up.”
Still, Schwab acknowledges that Em Dash “pushes the Word Press ecosystem to look honestly at how it does things” — and that’s exactly what it’s doing now. Just one day before the launch of Em Dash, Automattic’s Matias Ventura announced that the project is pushing back the launch of Word Press 7.0 for a “few weeks to finalize key architectural details.” Along with support for real-time collaborative editing, this update will include an AI client and an API that will allow Word Press to communicate with AI models.
Even Word Press’s more skeptical members are hopeful about the prospect of change. “If Word Press starts making the right architectural decisions now, it can still catch up,” de Valk writes. That could make Em Dash more like a catalyst for Word Press, rather than a true competitor.
Emma Roth Close Emma Roth News Writer Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Emma Roth
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Tech Close Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Tech
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Web Close Web Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Web
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
I tested three Windows laptops in the Mac Book Neo’s price range — there’s no contest
The Mac Book Neo is the best thing to happen to Windows in years
Continuous glucose monitoring made me continuously crazy
The AI industry’s race for profits is now existential Video
Key Takeaways
- Tech Expand Amazon Apple Facebook Google Microsoft Samsung Business See all tech
- Reviews Expand Smart Home Reviews Phone Reviews Tablet Reviews Headphone Reviews See all reviews
- Science Expand Space Energy Environment Health See all science
- Entertainment Expand TV Shows Movies Audio See all entertainment
- Policy Expand Antitrust Politics Law Security See all policy
