GitHub Copilot transforms the developer experience. Backed by the leaders in AI, GitHub Copilot provides contextualized assistance throughout the software development lifecycle, from inline suggestions and chat assistance in the IDE to code explanations and answers to docs in GitHub and more. With GitHub Copilot elevating their workflow, developers can focus on: value, innovation, and happiness.

GitHub Copilot enables developers to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration and spend less effort on the mundane and boilerplate. That’s why developers who use GitHub Copilot report up to 75% higher satisfaction with their jobs than those who don’t and are up to 55% more productive at writing code without sacrifice to quality, which all adds up to engaged developers shipping great software faster.

GitHub Copilot integrates with leading editors, including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim, and, unlike other AI coding assistants, is natively built into GitHub. Growing to millions of individual users and tens of thousands of business customers, GitHub Copilot is the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool and the competitive advantage developers ask for by name.

GitHub Copilot Free is a new free pricing tier with limited functionality for individual developers. Users assigned a Copilot Business or Copilot Enterprise seat are not eligible for access. Users with access to Copilot Pro through a paid subscription, trial, or through an existing verified OSS, student, faculty, or MVP account may elect to use Free instead. 

GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories. For each language, the quality of suggestions you receive may depend on the volume and diversity of training data for that language. For example, JavaScript is well-represented in public repositories and is one of GitHub Copilot’s best supported languages. Languages with less representation in public repositories may produce fewer or less robust suggestions.

GitHub Copilot is available as an extension in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Vim, Neovim, the JetBrains suite of IDEs, and Azure Data Studio. Although inline suggestion functionality is available across all these extensions, chat functionality is currently available only in Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio. GitHub Copilot is also supported in terminals through GitHub CLI and as a chat integration in Windows Terminal Canary. With the GitHub Copilot Enterprise plan, GitHub Copilot is natively integrated into GitHub.com. All plans are supported in GitHub Copilot in GitHub Mobile. GitHub Mobile for Copilot Pro and Copilot Business have access to Bing and public repository code search. Copilot Enterprise in GitHub Mobile gives you additional access to your organization's knowledge.

No, GitHub Copilot generates suggestions using probabilistic determination.

GitHub Copilot has multiple offerings for organizations and an offering for individual developers. All the offerings include both inline suggestion and chat assistance. The primary differences between the organization offerings and the individual offering are license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

Organizations can choose between GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise. GitHub Copilot Business primarily features GitHub Copilot in the coding environment - that is the IDE, CLI and GitHub Mobile. GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business. It also  adds an additional layer of customization for organizations and integrates into GitHub.com as a chat interface to allow developers to converse with GitHub Copilot throughout the platform. GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization’s codebase for a deeper understanding of the customer’s knowledge for more tailored suggestions and will offer customers access to fine-tuned custom, private models for inline suggestions.

GitHub Copilot Individual is designed for individual developers, freelancers, students, educators, and open source maintainers. The plan includes all the features of GitHub Copilot Business except organizational license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

GitHub Copilot has multiple offerings for organizations and an offering for individual developers. All the offerings include both code completion and chat assistance. The primary differences between the organization offerings and the individual offering are license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

Organizations can choose between GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise. GitHub Copilot Business primarily features GitHub Copilot in the coding environment - that is the IDE, CLI and GitHub Mobile. GitHub Copilot Enterprise includes everything in GitHub Copilot Business. It also  adds an additional layer of customization for organizations and integrates into GitHub.com as a chat interface to allow developers to converse with Copilot  throughout the platform. GitHub Copilot Enterprise can index an organization’s codebase for a deeper understanding of the customer’s knowledge for more tailored suggestions and will offer customers access to fine-tuned custom, private models for code completion.

GitHub Copilot Pro is designed for individual developers, freelancers, students, educators, and open source maintainers. The plan includes all the features of GitHub Copilot Business except organizational license management, policy management, and IP indemnity.

No. This capability is off by default and gives the enterprise admin control to enable or disable. An admin must explicitly enable two separate policies to activate: 

1. ‘Premium request paid usage’ must be enabled to allow enterprises to be charged for premium requests exceeding their included usage.

2. A new Copilot code review policy (‘Allow members without a Copilot license to use Copilot code review in github.com’) must also be enabled.

We encourage admins to set up budgets to control spending on our metered products, especially customers who have not enabled the ‘Premium request paid usage’ policy in the past. You can track all premium request usage in your billing dashboard to monitor and control spending.

GitHub Copilot processes personal data based on how Copilot is accessed and used: whether via GitHub.com, mobile app, extensions, or one of various IDE extensions, or through features like suggestions for the command line interface (CLI), IDE code completions, or personalized chat on GitHub.com. The types of personal data processed may include:

How GitHub uses Copilot data depends on how the user accesses Copilot and for what purpose. Users can access GitHub Copilot through the web, extensions, mobile apps, computer terminal, and various IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). GitHub generally uses personal data to:

These practices are outlined in GitHub’s Data Protection Agreement (DPA), which details our data handling commitments to our data controller customers. GitHub also uses certain personal data with customer authorization under the DPA, for the following purposes:

GitHub uses the Copilot data from Individual subscribers for all the operational purposes described above for Business/Enterprise subscribers.

In addition, for Individual subscribers only: GitHub may use Copilot interaction data — including prompts (inputs), suggestions (outputs), and code snippets generated during Copilot sessions — to train and improve AI models. This training helps improve code suggestions for all Copilot users.

Individual subscribers can opt out of having their data used for AI model training at any time through https://github.com/settings/copilot/features. Opting out does not affect your access to Copilot features.

For details on GitHub's data processing activities as a controller, particularly for Copilot Free, Copilot Pro, and Copilot Pro customers, refer to the GitHub Terms of Service and the GitHub Privacy Statement.

If and for how long GitHub’s retains Copilot data depends on how a Copilot user accesses Copilot and for what purpose. The default settings for Copilot Business and Enterprise Customers are as follows: 

Access through IDE for Chat and Code Completions:

All other GitHub Copilot access and use:

The primary IP considerations for GitHub Copilot relate to copyright. The model that powers Copilot is trained on a broad collection of publicly accessible code, which may include copyrighted code, and Copilot’s suggestions (in rare instances) may resemble the code its model was trained on. Here’s some basic information you should know about these considerations:

Copyright law permits the use of copyrighted works to train AI models:  Countries around the world have provisions in their copyright laws that enable machines to learn, understand, extract patterns, and facts from copyrighted materials, including software code. For example, the European Union, Japan, and Singapore, have express provisions permitting machine learning to develop AI models. Other countries including Canada, India, and the United States also permit such training under their fair use/fair dealing provisions. GitHub Copilot’s AI model was trained with the use of code from GitHub’s public repositories—which are publicly accessible and within the scope of permissible copyright use.

What about copyright risk in suggestions? In rare instances (less than 1% based on GitHub’s research), suggestions from GitHub may match examples of code used to train GitHub’s AI model. Again, Copilot does not “look up” or “copy and paste” code, but is instead using context from a user’s workspace to synthesize and generate a suggestion.

Our experience shows that matching suggestions are most likely to occur in two situations: (i) when there is little or no context in the code editor for Copilot’s model to synthesize, or (ii) when a matching suggestion represents a common approach or method. If a code suggestion matches existing code, there is risk that using that suggestion could trigger claims of copyright infringement, which would depend on the amount and nature of code used, and the context of how the code is used. In many ways, this is the same risk that arises when using any code that a developer does not originate, such as copying code from an online source, or reusing code from a library. That is why responsible organizations and developers recommend that users employ code scanning policies to identify and evaluate potential matching code.

In Copilot, you can opt whether to allow Copilot to suggest code completions that match publicly available code on GitHub.com. For more information, see "Configuring GitHub Copilot settings on GitHub.com". If you have allowed suggestions that match public code, GitHub Copilot can provide you with details about the matching code when you accept such suggestions. Matching code does not necessarily mean copyright infringement, so it is ultimately up to the user to determine whether to use the suggestion, and what and who to attribute (along with other license compliance) in appropriate circumstances.

Yes, GitHub Copilot does include an optional code referencing filter to detect and suppress certain suggestions that match public code on GitHub.

We don’t determine whether a suggestion is capable of being owned, but we are clear that GitHub does not claim ownership of a suggestion. Whether a suggestion generated by an AI model can be owned depends on many factors (e.g. the intellectual property law in the relevant country, the length of the suggestion, the extent that suggestion is considered ‘functional’ instead of expressive, etc).

No. Copilot is a tool intended to make developers more efficient. It’s not intended to replace developers, who should continue to apply the same sorts of safeguards and diligence they would apply with regard to any third-party code of unknown origin.

Not necessarily. GitHub Copilot users should align their use of Copilot with their respective risk tolerances.