GitHub retires four Copilot models on October 2 and starts charging for seats up front on October 1

GitHub published three Copilot changes on September 3, 2026. Read separately they are routine housekeeping. Read together they are two deadlines in the same week of October and one change to how a seat is paid for, and all three land on the person who administers Copilot rather than on the person using it.

Four models go on October 2

The retirement covers every Copilot surface: chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions. GitHub asks that workflows and integrations move to a supported model before the date, and notes that Business and Enterprise administrators may have to enable the replacement through the model policy in Copilot settings first. Nothing has to be removed by hand afterwards.

• Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.6 Flash, with Gemini 3.8 Flash suggested in their place.
• Kimi K2.7 Code, with Kimi K3 suggested in its place.
• Claude Opus 4.7, with Claude Opus 5 suggested in its place.

Gemini 3.8 Flash arrives on the same day

The replacement for both retired Flash models is available to Copilot Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise, and can be picked in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the Copilot cloud agent, the GitHub Copilot app, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, and Eclipse. Rollout is gradual, so an empty model picker on the day of the announcement is expected rather than broken.

Billing has a date attached. GitHub says the model is billed at introductory provider pricing under usage-based billing through December 31, 2026, which means the rate you measure this autumn is not the rate you should budget for next year. Under default model enablement it turns itself on for Business and Enterprise unless an administrator has switched off the global default or disabled this specific model.

A seat is now paid for before it is used

GitHub is gradually reopening Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise signups for customers paying by credit card or PayPal, over roughly the next two weeks, and says it is strengthening account vetting and changing billing at the same time. The company does not say when signups closed or why.

The billing part is the part with teeth. Every new Business or Enterprise seat assignment requires payment for that seat before the user gets access, and at the start of the next billing cycle every assigned seat incurs an upfront charge. For customers who already have Copilot, that starts on October 1, 2026. Plan pricing, seat proration, and the ability to buy usage beyond the included allowance do not change. One detail is easy to miss: fully cancelling Copilot and coming back later can trigger the new vetting and billing behavior.