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Content Strategy6 min read

The Board Is Gone. The Antitrust Case Is Back. Automattic’s September 25 Double-Event Changes

The Day Two Things Landed at Once

Two events dropped September 25. The WordPress ecosystem covered them as separate stories. They are not separate.

Read together, they describe the governance environment for every content team running AI-assisted publishing workflows on WordPress right now. And right now matters, because the next significant hearing in this case happened September 30.

What Happened in 33 Hours, and What Got Built After

On September 9, Automattic's board voted to place CEO Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. He received notice 50 minutes before the vote. His request for independent legal review was denied. By September 11 he was back. Every board member who voted against him was gone. CFO Mark Davies was let go. Chief Legal Officer Andy Missan was out. Automattic's entire legal team was replaced while an active antitrust trial sits on the 2027 calendar.

Then September 25 arrived.

Mullenweg revealed his new board to Automattic staff via the company's announcements channel in Slack. Hugh Howey, bestselling author of the dystopian Silo series. Amy Chan, author of Breakup Bootcamp. Henry Khachatryan and Krutal Desai, co-founders of IRL, a social app that shut down in 2023 after investigations found nearly all of its user base was composed of bots. New advisers joined as well: former Whoop CTO Jaime Waydo, June co-founder Matt Van Horn, and KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah.

Mullenweg also announced that for purposes of Delaware law, he now simultaneously holds the titles of CEO, President, Treasurer, and Secretary of Automattic.

No independent governance layer remains. That is the structural fact worth sitting with.

His statement to TechCrunch after the reveal: "We are living through times of unprecedented change, possibly a singularity. The next six months will determine the next 20 years of Automattic."

The Antitrust Ruling Dropped the Same Day

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín reversed her April 2025 dismissal of WP Engine's antitrust claims on September 25. Four counts are back: monopolization, attempted monopolization, and two illegal tying claims.

The tying claims specifically allege that the WordPress.org login checkbox, which forces users to confirm they are not affiliated with WP Engine, constitutes negative tying under both federal antitrust law and California law. The judge found WP Engine had plausibly alleged market power and competitive harm sufficient for those claims to proceed.

Automattic scored points too. WP Engine's extortion claim was dismissed for good. The court ruled Automattic's 2024 licensing fee demand sought payment for something of genuine value. All seven of Automattic's trademark counterclaims survived at least in part. This was not a clean WP Engine win.

But four antitrust counts surviving means the question of whether one person's control over WordPress.org constitutes illegal monopolization goes to a jury. Trial date: October 2027.

A sanctions hearing before Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan was scheduled for September 30. WP Engine alleges Mullenweg failed to properly preserve WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram messages relevant to the case. Automattic has argued it produced over 225,000 documents and that WP Engine cannot identify a single missing case-relevant message.

The Platform Underneath Your Content Operation

WordPress powers approximately 43% of all websites globally. W3Techs data from September 24, 2026 puts its CMS market share at 58.8%, down from 63.2% in July 2023. Six consecutive quarters of decline. Shopify holds 7.8%. Wix 6.2%. Squarespace 3.6%. The gap is still enormous. The slide is real.

That slide did not happen because WordPress got worse as software. It happened because governance uncertainty became a factor buyers of new sites weigh. Plugin developers are seeing paid user bases contract. WordCamp attendance has declined. The WordPress 7.2 AI roadmap, with write abilities and MCP Adapter Plugin Directory distribution, is genuinely strong. The corporate structure around it is not.

Mullenweg controls 84% of Automattic's voting shares. He controls WordPress.org personally, what court documents describe as his personal project, without a formal governance board or appeals process. He controls the plugin and theme directory that governs which tools reach the 43% of the web built on WordPress. He entered a high-stakes antitrust trial after replacing his CFO, CLO, and entire legal team in the span of two weeks.

That is a specific concentration of control. Without precedent in the platform's history.

What to Do With Your WordPress Content Stack

WordPress 7.1.2, a security release for a critical severity vulnerability, shipped September 22. Check your dashboard now under Dashboard > Updates. Apply it immediately if you have not. This update is not optional and the vulnerability is rated critical.

WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 arrives October 20-22. The AI features in that release, including write abilities, MCP Adapter Plugin Directory distribution, and streaming AI responses, run on the WordPress core team's timeline independent of Automattic's corporate situation. If your team is planning AI-assisted content publishing workflows on WordPress, test them in Playground before Beta 1 ships. The Playground environment at playground.wordpress.net supports trunk builds with zero setup.

Audit your plugin dependencies now. Identify which tools in your content automation stack route through Automattic-controlled plugins: Jetpack, Akismet, and other services hosted on WordPress.com infrastructure. Know whether self-hosted alternatives exist before you need them. The WP Engine trial runs to October 2027. That is twelve months of ongoing exposure to follow.

Your site is not at risk from the open-source code itself. The GPL license protecting WordPress is not part of this dispute. What is at risk is the governance structure around the distribution layer your plugins travel through.

For teams using WordPress as an AI-assisted news or authority content publishing platform: keep WordPress core current, keep your plugin list short and documented, and watch what the September 30 sanctions hearing produces. If Magistrate Judge Krishnan issues adverse inference instructions, Automattic's legal position in the broader antitrust trial weakens measurably. That pressure accelerates in unpredictable ways.

This is not a case for leaving WordPress. It is a case for understanding exactly what you are running on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Automattic board situation affect my WordPress site right now? Not directly. WordPress.org plugin and theme infrastructure has continued operating normally throughout the dispute. The GPL license protecting the core software is not at risk regardless of trial outcome. Apply the 7.1.2 security update immediately if you have not already done so.

When does the WP Engine vs. Automattic trial start? A 10-day jury trial is scheduled for October 2027. The September 30 sanctions hearing before Magistrate Judge Ajay Krishnan was the next event with potential to affect Automattic's legal position before trial.

Which plugins are Automattic-controlled? Jetpack and Akismet are the most widely deployed. WooCommerce, Jetpack Boost, WP Super Cache, and Akismet Spam Protection all carry Automattic ownership. Check your installed plugins list under Plugins > Installed Plugins and cross-reference ownership before the situation escalates further.

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