cPanel & WHM v138 has been promoted to the production RELEASE tier (current build 11.138.0.7), a few weeks after v136 sat there waiting for it. This is the biggest interface change cPanel has shipped in years — a new opt-in theme called Meridian, an embedded AI Assistant, an AI app builder called Nova, and native MCP support for connecting AI agents to WHM. None of it is a routine maintenance bump, so it's worth understanding what changes before it lands on a fleet you didn't plan to touch.
Meridian: an opt-in replacement for Jupiter
Meridian is a new cPanel theme, not a forced migration — Jupiter stays the default and users can switch between the two from their account. Where Jupiter organizes features by category (Files, Databases, Email…), Meridian regroups everything into six goal-based hubs:
| Hub | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Websites | Domains, site builders, WordPress, SSL |
| Accounts, forwarders, filters, deliverability tools | |
| Files | File Manager, FTP, backups |
| Databases | MySQL/MariaDB, phpMyAdmin |
| Security | Password policy, IP blocker, SSH access |
| Performance | Caching, PHP versions, resource usage |
A Dashboard surfaces required actions and suggested next steps instead of a static feature grid, and a Guided Setup flow walks a new user through domain, website, and email configuration in one pass — cPanel's own pitch is a live site in under 10 minutes. If you've already built documentation or support macros around Jupiter's layout, budget time to redo them for Meridian before you flip it on for customers, since the two themes don't share screenshots or menu paths.
AI Assistant and Nova
Two distinct AI features ship inside Meridian, and they solve different problems:
- AI Assistant is a chat panel reachable from an "Ask AI" button in the bottom-right corner of every Meridian page. It answers plain-language questions about the account — "why is my mail bouncing," "how do I add a subdomain" — without leaving the interface.
- Nova is further along the automation curve: it builds a working site or application from a conversational description rather than manual configuration, then the AI Assistant stays attached to that site afterward for contextual troubleshooting.
Both are gated behind a valid license — cPanel's AI tooling installs for licensed servers automatically rather than as a separate purchase, so there's no extra SKU to buy on top of your existing cPanel license. Whether that's appropriate to expose to end users on a shared server is a policy decision worth making deliberately rather than inheriting by default the day you upgrade.
MCP connections in WHM
v138 adds native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support: a WebPros Dashboard widget in the WHM header manages MCP key issuance for servers linked to a WebPros account, and end users manage their own AI agent connections from the avatar menu. In practice this means Claude, ChatGPT, or another MCP-aware agent can be authorized to act on a cPanel account's behalf — similar ground to what Plesk's MCP Server extension covers on the Plesk side, though the two implementations aren't compatible with each other.
Domain renaming
Outside the AI features, v138 adds the ability to rename a primary, addon, or alias domain in place, with custom DNS records and subdomains migrated automatically instead of requiring a delete-and-recreate. This has been a long-standing gap versus Plesk, which has supported in-place domain renaming for years — see the domain-handling differences covered in cPanel vs Plesk in 2026 for the rest of that comparison.
Should you upgrade now
RELEASE-tier promotion means v138 is feature-complete and has cleared cPanel's own testing bar, and servers on the RELEASE update tier will pick it up automatically within the usual staggered rollout window. There's no security reason to rush it — critical patches ship to every supported branch regardless of which major version you're on — so the deciding factor is whether you want Meridian, AI Assistant, and MCP access live on your fleet now versus after you've had time to review them internally. If you're not ready, pinning to v136 a little longer via update tier settings is a legitimate choice; v136 isn't EOL yet.