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Code Assistants·Free; Pro $10/user/mo; Pro+ $39/user/mo; Business $19/user/mo; Enterprise $39/user/mo·copilot.github.com

GitHub Copilot

GitHub's AI coding assistant with inline completions, chat, code review, and agent mode across VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Neovim, GitHub.com, and the CLI.

Risk Score
Low
3/10

Independent assessment across data handling, compliance, security and transparency.

Overview

GitHub Copilot is the developer-facing coding assistant from GitHub (Microsoft), offering inline completions, Copilot Chat, code review, Copilot Workspace, and multi-model choice including GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini. Deep integration with pull requests, issues, and the GitHub Actions runtime makes it the default enterprise code assistant. Sold in Free, Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise tiers. Business and Enterprise are in scope for GitHub's SOC 2 and ISO 27001 programs and contractually exclude customer interactions from model training. As of April 24, 2026, Free/Pro/Pro+ individual tiers use interaction data for model training on an opt-out basis, creating a notable split between consumer and commercial tiers.

Risk factors

3
  • Self-hosted option available for enterprise
  • Strong enterprise controls and security features
  • Minimal data access with user consent

Recommendations

8
  • Provision all developers via Copilot Business or Enterprise under the corporate GitHub org; retire individual seats for work
  • Enforce SSO/SCIM on the GitHub Enterprise Cloud tenant and block personal accounts on managed devices
  • Enable the duplicate-code detection/filter in admin policy to suppress suggestions matching public code
  • Turn on content exclusions (copilot-ignore / content_exclusions) to keep secrets directories and sensitive repos out of context
  • Require code review and branch protection on any Copilot-authored PR; prohibit Copilot agent auto-merge
  • Allowlist MCP servers and Copilot extensions centrally; block arbitrary user-installed ones in enterprise policy
  • Scan Copilot output and committed code with existing SAST, secret-scanning, and SCA pipelines — not a Copilot-only review
  • Train developers not to paste secrets, customer PII, or production data into Chat, even on Business/Enterprise

Data handling

Storage
Prompts and suggestions are processed by GitHub and its model providers (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic, Google). Enterprise data follows GitHub's existing data residency options where available; no customer code is stored server-side for suggestions.
Retention
Business/Enterprise: prompts, suggestions, and context are retained transiently for abuse monitoring per the GitHub DPA. Chat transcripts are retained up to 28 days for Business/Enterprise. Individual tiers retain interactions longer for model-improvement purposes.
Training on inputs
GitHub does not use Copilot Business or Enterprise prompts, suggestions, or code snippets to train foundation models. As of April 24, 2026, Copilot Free/Pro/Pro+ interactions are used for training on an opt-out basis.