Artificial intelligence has rapidly moved from a novelty into a practical part of everyday content workflows, and WordPress is finally catching up with first-party tools that bring large language models directly into the block editor. If you publish on WordPress and you want to use Anthropic’s Claude to draft titles, rephrase paragraphs, generate excerpts, or surface editorial suggestions on your posts, this guide walks you through the entire setup from start to finish. By the end you will have Claude wired into your Gutenberg editor and a clear sense of what each AI helper actually does inside a real post.
What you will need before you start
Before installing anything, gather three things. First, an Anthropic account with billing set up, which you can create at console.anthropic.com. Anthropic operates on a prepay model, so you will need to load credit before any API calls succeed. A small top-up of five or ten dollars is more than enough to experiment with for weeks. Second, a self-hosted WordPress site running version 6.4 or later with administrator access, because the AI plugin registers settings pages and editor scripts that require an admin role. Third, the Gutenberg block editor enabled rather than the Classic Editor plugin, because every feature this guide covers runs as part of the block editor experience.
Step 1: Get your Anthropic API key
Log into the Anthropic Console and open the API Keys section from the left-hand menu. Click Create Key, give the key a descriptive name such as wordpress-site so you can identify it later if you ever need to revoke it, and copy the generated key somewhere safe. The key begins with sk-ant- and Anthropic only shows it to you once, so paste it into a password manager immediately. While you are in the console, click into Billing and confirm you have credit on the account. Without credit, every editor button you press will return an error from Anthropic about insufficient funds rather than the polished AI output you were expecting.
Step 2: Install the AI Provider for Anthropic plugin
Inside your WordPress admin, go to Plugins and click Add Plugin. Search for AI Provider for Anthropic, which is published by the WordPress AI Team. Install it and click Activate. This plugin is intentionally minimal: it does not add any blocks, sidebars, or settings pages of its own to the Gutenberg editor. Its sole responsibility is to register an Anthropic connector that other plugins can consume. Think of it as the credentials adapter, not the user interface. If you only install this plugin and look at the post editor afterwards, nothing visible will have changed, which is exactly the point at which most people assume the plugin is broken. It is not.
Step 3: Install the AI plugin
Now install the second piece: a plugin simply called AI, published by WordPress.org Contributors. This is the companion plugin that actually surfaces Claude inside the editor. Activate it and you will notice two new submenus appear under Settings: AI and Connectors. The AI submenu is where you turn editor features on and off. The Connectors submenu is shared across any AI plugin you install, and it is where credentials live so you only have to enter them once. Together, this pair of plugins gives you a clean separation between the provider, where keys are stored, and the consumer, where features run.
Step 4: Connect your Anthropic API key
Go to Settings, then Connectors. You will see a list of supported providers including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Click Install or Edit beside Anthropic and paste in the sk-ant- key you generated earlier. Save the connector and the row should change to a green Connected badge. This single setup is shared across every plugin on your site that uses the Connectors framework, so if you later add another AI plugin you will not have to re-enter the key. While you are here, take a moment to note the prompt at the top of the page that suggests installing the AI plugin if it is not yet active, which is a useful sanity check.
Step 5: Enable editor features in Settings, AI
Open Settings, AI. At the top right of the page is a master Enable AI toggle that gates everything else, so flip that on first. Below it you will find two sections, Editor Experiments and Admin Experiments. The Editor Experiments section is where the in-editor Claude helpers live. The most useful toggles to start with are Title Generation, Excerpt Generation, Content Resizing, Editorial Notes, and Content Summarization. Image Generation and Editing also lives in this area but it requires an image-capable provider such as OpenAI or Google, because Claude is a text-only model. If you do not need images, leave that toggle off.
Down in Admin Experiments there is a toggle called Connector Approval. When it is on, an administrator must explicitly approve each plugin’s right to use each connector before any AI calls go through. This is more secure, but for a single-author site it adds friction without adding much real protection, so most users leave it off. If you turn it on and then see editor errors mentioning that the Anthropic connector has not been approved for ai/ai.php, that is the cause.
Step 6: Using the AI helpers in Gutenberg
Open Posts, Add New, and you will notice several new affordances inside the editor. As soon as you type a working title, a small Regenerate button with a sparkle icon appears above it. Click it and Claude proposes alternative titles based on whatever body content the post already contains. Over in the Post sidebar on the right, there is a refresh icon next to the Add an excerpt link that triggers excerpt generation, a Generate Editorial Notes button that walks the post block by block and attaches inline accessibility, readability, grammar, and SEO suggestions, and a Generate Summary button that produces a short summary once the post has at least one hundred characters of body content.
Inside the block toolbar that appears above any paragraph you click into, you will see a small flask icon. Click it to reveal three options: Shorten, Expand, and Rephrase. Shorten compresses a paragraph while preserving its key point, Expand fleshes it out with more detail and examples, and Rephrase keeps the meaning but rewrites the sentence structure. These run on whichever block is selected, so to rewrite an entire post you step through each block in turn. If you do not like a result, Ctrl+Z undoes it just like any other edit, which makes experimentation cheap and reversible.
Step 7: A realistic workflow
A practical writing flow looks like this. Draft a working title and a rough body, even if it is just bullet points expanded into short paragraphs. Use Expand on any thin sections, Shorten on anything that drags, and Rephrase on anything that reads awkwardly. Click Regenerate above the title to see polished alternatives. Click the excerpt generate icon to draft a short summary for archive pages and meta descriptions. If you want a quality pass, click Generate Editorial Notes and review the inline suggestions block by block, accepting the ones you agree with. Finally tick your categories and tags, set a featured image, and either save as draft, schedule, or publish.
Troubleshooting common issues
If buttons appear to do nothing, open your browser developer tools and watch the Network tab while clicking. A failed call to api.anthropic.com usually points to either a missing or invalid key, no credit on the Anthropic account, or the Connector Approval toggle blocking the request. If the editor never shows any AI controls at all after installing both plugins, hard refresh the post editor so the new scripts load, and double check that the master Enable AI toggle on the Settings, AI page is actually on. If image generation fails with a message that no image-capable provider is connected, the fix is to install the OpenAI or Google connector, because Anthropic does not currently expose an image model through this plugin.
A note on cost and privacy
Every click of a Claude-powered button is a billable API call against your Anthropic account. The amounts are small, typically a fraction of a cent for a paragraph rephrase, but they do add up across a large site. Keep an eye on your Anthropic billing dashboard for the first week so you have a sense of your real usage. On privacy, remember that the contents of any block you ask Claude to act on are sent to Anthropic’s servers for processing. Anthropic’s enterprise terms govern how that data is handled, so review them before using these features on confidential drafts or client material.
Wrapping up
Once both plugins are installed, your Anthropic key is connected, and the editor experiments are enabled, Claude becomes a quiet collaborator inside Gutenberg rather than a separate tool you have to context-switch into. The best way to get value from it is to lean on the small, reversible assists. Generate a title, polish a paragraph, draft an excerpt, run an editorial pass. Treat the output as a first draft, not a final answer, and keep your own editorial voice at the centre. Used that way, the WordPress AI plugin with the Anthropic connector turns a blank Add New Post screen into a noticeably faster route to a publishable piece.