Copilot's global model policy starts enforcing on September 1, and the default is on

GitHub announced the default model policy for Copilot in July. On August 26 it said enforcement is now rolling out, gradually, through September 1, reaching different enterprises at different times. If you administer a Copilot Business or Copilot Enterprise plan, the change worth understanding before that date is what happens to the models you never made a decision about.

Unconfigured stops meaning unavailable

Previously unconfigured models, and new generally available models as they arrive, inherit the global policy state. In your settings they move to a state GitHub calls Delegate to default policy, and from then on they follow whatever the policy says. The policy is enabled by default, so in the ordinary case those models become available to your users.

That state is live rather than a one-time copy. Change the policy later and every model sitting in it follows the change. Explicit decisions are untouched: if an administrator has deliberately turned a specific model on or off, GitHub does not alter that setting.

After the rollout each model shows one of four states: explicitly on, explicitly off, delegating to an enterprise team or organization, or delegating to the default policy.

Two categories the policy cannot switch on

Open-weight models are excluded from default enablement regardless of your policy, and GitHub names DeepSeek and Kimi K2 as examples. So are models not covered by GitHub's data retention agreement, where the named example is Fable 5.

That second exclusion is the one to read carefully. Fable 5 is held back by a contract, not by a capability judgment. The roster your developers see is shaped in part by which agreements GitHub has in place, which is a different axis from which model is best at the work.

The state GitHub may remove

GitHub says it is evaluating making the global policy an explicit decision and removing the Delegate to default policy state entirely, so that every policy reflects an intentional choice rather than an inferred one. It has opened a community discussion for feedback on that.

If that lands, the convenience of a single switch that governs everything unconfigured goes away, and the administrative work moves forward rather than disappearing. Worth knowing now, while the model list is small enough to go through.