Microsoft (GitHub Copilot)

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant offered by GitHub, the developer platform owned by Microsoft. Developed by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI, it provides code completion and programming assistance across integrated development environments including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, Eclipse, and JetBrains IDEs. The product is marketed as "your AI pair programmer."

Copilot launched as a technical preview on June 29, 2021, originally powered by OpenAI's Codex model — a code-specialized descendant of GPT-3 fine-tuned on GitHub data (since deprecated). It reached general availability for individual developers in June 2022. The product is available by subscription to individual developers and businesses, with a lineup that has expanded to include a free tier alongside paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, plus a Copilot Chat conversational interface and agentic workflow capabilities.

Copilot's model strategy has shifted from its single-model origins toward giving developers a choice of underlying AI models. In October 2024, GitHub announced that Copilot would become multi-model, adding support for Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini alongside OpenAI's models.

As a flagship AI coding tool from a major platform vendor, innovations in AI-assisted software development, code generation models, and agentic developer workflows are directly relevant to Copilot's evolution and competitive positioning.