GitHub Copilot becomes generally available as a paid product

GitHub made Copilot generally available on 21 June 2022 at ten dollars a month, free to verified students and to maintainers of popular open source projects. It had run as a technical preview since June 2021 and suggests code inside the editor, drawing on Codex, a model trained on public code.

Background

Copilot had been in technical preview since June 2021, and machine-learned code completion was older than that: TabNine and Kite had both been offering it commercially for years.

What none of them had was scale or a serious price. Completion was a convenience feature bundled into an editor, and nobody had asked a working developer to pay a subscription for a model’s suggestions.

What happened

GitHub made Copilot generally available on 21 June 2022, at ten dollars a month or a hundred a year, free to verified students and to maintainers of popular open source projects.

It suggests code inside the editor, drawing on Codex, a model trained on billions of lines of public code. Given a comment describing what a developer wants, it will attempt the function.

GitHub said plainly at the time that the suggestions can carry insecure patterns, bugs and outdated interfaces, because the code it learned from carries them.

What followed

The pricing is the part that mattered. A model trained on other people’s published work became something a professional pays for and uses all day, and that changed the question about the training data from one of principle to one of contract.

Litigation followed later that year on behalf of developers whose public repositories had been used. The entry records that it was brought rather than how it ended, which an editor may now be able to say.

Why it mattered

Suggesting code was not new. What changed is that a large company put a price on it and ordinary developers paid, which made a model trained on other people's published work a routine part of writing software and turned the question of what that training permits from a matter of principle into a matter of contract.

Sources

• GitHub Copilot is generally available to all developers. github.blog. Official
• Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code. arxiv.org. Primary source

Cite this page

AI Achievements. (2022). GitHub Copilot becomes generally available as a paid product. Retrieved 2026-08-29, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/github-copilot-generally-available

@misc{achievements_github_copilot_generally_available,
  title  = {GitHub Copilot becomes generally available as a paid product},
  author = {{AI Achievements}},
  year   = {2022},
  url    = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/github-copilot-generally-available}
}