GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is the AI coding assistant built by GitHub, the Microsoft-owned code hosting platform. It launched as a technical preview in 2021 and became generally available to all developers on 21 June 2022 as an “AI pair programr” that suggests code inside the editor. More than 1.2 million developers used the preview in its first year.

Copilot has since grown from autocomplete into a set of agentic tools across the development lifecycle. In the editor, it runs in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, Neovim and Eclipse, and its agent mode can edit files across a workspace. On GitHub.com, cloud agents can be assigned issues and work in the background, and Copilot Code Review analyses pull requests. A Copilot CLI brings the agent to the terminal, a desktop app lets teams launch, track and merge agent work from one place, and GitHub Mobile supports it as well.

A defining feature is model choice. GitHub lets users pick from models optimized for speed, accuracy or cost, naming Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT models among the options, and it supports third-party agents such as Claude Code and Codex. Microsoft AI’s MAI-Code-1-Flash is built into Copilot and VS Code, and xAI’s Grok 4.6 was added in August 2026.

Copilot is offered on Free, Pro, Pro+ and Max tiers for individuals and Business and Enterprise tiers for organizations, the latter adding governance, IP indemnity and codebase indexing. It is used by individual developers, students, open-source maintainers and enterprise engineering teams.

Plan details are on the GitHub Copilot plans page.