GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is the AI pair programmer from GitHub and Microsoft, originally announced as a technical preview on June 29, 2021 and made generally available on June 21, 2022. It evolved from Microsoft’s 2014 “Bing Code Search” research plugin and is now positioned as the flagship AI offering of GitHub’s development platform.

The product unifies inline code completions, conversational chat, autonomous cloud coding agents, in-IDE agent mode, Copilot code review, and Copilot Spaces for project-scoped context. As of September 2026 the current model lineup includes Anthropic Claude (Fable 5.1, Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Haiku 4.5), OpenAI GPT-5 mini through GPT-6 Astra, Google Gemini 3.8 Flash, xAI Grok 4.6, and GitHub-tuned Copilot models; Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.5/3.6 Flash are deprecated and retire on October 2, 2026.

Pricing (2026)

Plan	Price (per user/month)	Included GitHub AI Credits
Free	$0	Limited chat/agent usage + 2,000 completions/month
Pro	$10	~$15 base + flex
Pro+	$39	~$70 base + flex
Max	$100	~$200 base + flex
Business	$19	Pooled per-seat credits
Enterprise	$39	Pooled per-seat credits

Code completions and next-edit suggestions remain free across all plans; premium model usage consumes GitHub AI Credits (1 credit = $0.01 USD) under the usage-based billing model that took effect June 1, 2026.

Integrations

GitHub Copilot is available natively in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, Neovim, Eclipse IDE, Raycast, GitHub CLI, GitHub Mobile, and Windows Terminal (Canary). It also runs on github.com and as the standalone GitHub Copilot desktop app, with MCP server support for connecting external tools and data sources.

Key Milestones

• June 29, 2021 — Technical preview announced for VS Code
• October 2021 — JetBrains and Neovim plugins released
• March 29, 2022 — Visual Studio 2022 support added
• June 21, 2022 — General availability as a subscription product
• November 2023 — Copilot Chat upgraded to GPT-4
• 2024 — Multi-model support (Gemini, Claude, OpenAI)
• February 6, 2025 — Agent mode announced
• May 19, 2025 — Coding agent announced
• June 1, 2026 — Switch to usage-based GitHub AI Credits billing
• August 14, 2026 — xAI Grok 4.6 added
• September 2026 — Claude Fable 5.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and GPT-6 Astra reach general availability

Market Position

Per third-party analysis (August 2026), GitHub Copilot holds roughly 51% share of the AI coding-assistant market with ~$0.9–1.1B ARR (Microsoft has not officially disclosed revenue), 4.7M paid seats (up ~75% YoY), and 77,000+ paying organizations. Main competitors include Cursor, Tabnine, Codeium, Windsurf, and Claude Code.