GitHub Copilot Graduates From Preview, Now Generally Available

GitHub announced that Copilot, its AI pair-programming tool built on OpenAI's Codex model, was moving out of technical preview and becoming generally available to individual developers for $10 a month or $100 a year.

Copilot suggests whole lines or blocks of code as developers type, drawing on patterns learned from billions of lines of public source code. GitHub said the tool had already been used by more than a million developers during its year-long preview and that, in some editor contexts, up to 40% of code in supported languages was being written with Copilot's help.

The general release also introduced free access for verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects. The launch reignited debate over the legal status of AI models trained on public code, with some developers raising concerns about licensing and attribution.