GitHub Copilot goes on sale

GitHub made Copilot, its AI pair-programming tool built on OpenAI’s Codex model, generally available and put it on sale for the first time, at $10 a month or $100 a year for individual developers. Verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects could use it free. The move ended a technical-preview period that had run for roughly a year and drawn more than 1.2 million developers on a waitlist, and made Copilot the first large language model product sold on a per-seat subscription basis rather than offered as a research demo or API metered by usage.

Copilot suggested whole lines or blocks of code as a developer typed, trained on public code hosted on GitHub, including code released under open-source licences. That training data was the source of the product’s main controversy: critics, and a subsequent class-action lawsuit filed later that year, argued the tool reproduced licensed code without attribution or licence compliance, while GitHub maintained that suggestions were rarely verbatim copies and that use of public code for training fell within fair use.

The general-availability launch mattered less for what Copilot could do — autocomplete-style suggestion, not autonomous task completion — than for what it established commercially: that a language model’s output could be sold directly to end users at a defined price, integrated into the tool developers already used daily, rather than accessed as infrastructure. Microsoft, GitHub’s owner, used the pricing and adoption data from Copilot to justify the much larger “Copilot” branding it later applied across its productivity software.