Code hosting and collaboration platform. Product changelog covering Actions, Copilot, repos, and more.
August 2026 update adds more control over how Copilot reasons, model selection, team-shared specialized agents, and code review workflows for Visual Studio users.
GitHub Copilot releases provide users with more control over how Copilot runs, including new team collaboration features in Slack and Teams, along with customization options across the app, CLI, and IDE.
GitHub is making three separate upcoming changes to Copilot policies and billing to provide a consistent experience. Users should review the updates to understand potential impacts.
GitHub has improved label management on issues to make it easier to organize and discover labels, especially helpful for repositories with extensive label lists. The feature includes suggested labels to help users find the right label more quickly.
Copilot code review now supports additional pull request types, including automatic reviews on bot-authored PRs and very large PRs, with improved resolution explanations for review decisions.
GitHub Classroom has been deprecated as of August 28, 2026, and its website, APIs, and services have been decommissioned in favor of selected partner solutions.
Starting October 1, 2026, checks, workflow runs, and statuses will be governed by the same Actions retention setting that controls artifacts and logs, unifying retention policy management across all workflow data.
When you block a user from your personal account or organization, you can now automatically close all their open issues, discussions, and pull requests in one action.
Plugin marketplaces in enterprise-managed settings can now be configured for automatic updates by setting autoUpdate: true on extraKnownMarketplaces entries. Supported clients automatically check and update these marketplaces.
GitHub is rolling out enforcement of a default model policy for generally available Copilot models across Copilot Business and Enterprise plans. This policy was previously announced in July and is now being gradually enforced.
Enterprise owners can now grant GitHub Apps access to enterprise billing data by selecting the enterprise billing permission when creating or configuring an app.
The rule insights dashboard is now generally available at both repository and organization levels, providing a visual overview of how GitHub evaluates and enforces repository rules.
The Customize tab in the GitHub Copilot app is now generally available, allowing teams to integrate Copilot with their existing tools and workflows through MCP support.
Users can now block other users directly from security advisory pages in public repositories, streamlining the moderation experience for repository owners.
Push rules in rulesets now allow you to configure path exceptions, enabling rules to apply everywhere in scope except for specific file paths you choose to exempt.
GitHub has improved the blocked users management interface for personal accounts and organizations, adding search by username, full name, or email along with sorting and pagination capabilities for easier list navigation.
GitHub Copilot agentic capabilities are now available in Slack through the GitHub integration, bringing CLI and app functionality directly into Slack for easier workflow integration.
GitHub Copilot now supports shared agentic work sessions in Microsoft Teams, allowing teams to collaborate on agent tasks together by mentioning @GitHub in channels, threads, or direct messages.
Saved views can now be pinned to the repository issues sidebar for quick access to frequently used views. This feature is now generally available.
The Windows 11 arm64 image with Visual Studio 2026 is now generally available on standard and larger GitHub-hosted runners, enabling developers to use it in GitHub Actions workflows.
Code scanning alerts can now be dismissed with a "Mitigated" reason when vulnerabilities are controlled by external measures like web application firewalls or network policies. This allows developers to document when risks are managed outside the application itself.
A dedicated workflow path for CodeQL code quality actions is now generally available, allowing you to distinguish Code Quality runs in your workflow history and Actions usage reports.
GitHub Code Quality now writes audit log events when users enable, disable, or change its settings on a repository, providing history through new audit log event types.
CodeQL 2.26.3 adds JavaScript, TypeScript, and Vue source modeling and improves the accuracy of several GitHub Actions queries to enhance the static analysis capabilities of GitHub code scanning.
The organization-level Code Quality dashboard now includes a Trends tab that shows how code quality has changed across your repositories over time, replacing point-in-time snapshots with historical visibility.
GitHub Copilot for JetBrains now supports enterprise managed settings for plugin governance, MCP server access, OpenTelemetry, and permission modes, allowing administrators to apply consistent controls across the enterprise.
GitHub now supports token-type and user-specific credential revocation and deauthorization during security incidents, enabling more granular control over compromised credentials in incident response scenarios.
OAuth apps can now opt in to expiring access tokens and refresh tokens, and support multiple redirect URIs for more secure and flexible app development.
Grok 4.6, xAI's latest reasoning model, is now rolling out in GitHub Copilot for agentic coding and complex multi-step workflows.
Weekly updates to GitHub Copilot including new models, portable plugins, and improved agent workflows across editors, command line, and the Copilot app.
GitHub now uses package registries like npmjs.org and PyPI to determine license information for software components in the dependency graph, improving the accuracy and completeness of displayed licenses.
Users can now block or unblock other users directly from comments on pull requests and issues in personal GitHub repositories, streamlining content moderation and collaboration controls.
Google's latest Gemini 3.7 Flash model is now rolling out in GitHub Copilot, with improvements for web and app development as well as agentic capabilities.
Agent Plugins 1.0 is now available, allowing developers to build plugins once and deploy them across compatible agent clients including VS Code, Copilot CLI, and the Copilot app. Released August 6 in collaboration with AWS, Anysphere, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Vercel.
The rule insights dashboard is now available in public preview at the organization level, providing a visual overview of how GitHub evaluates and enforces repository rulesets across your organization.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.22 is now available with new capabilities across the platform, including administrator configuration options for Copilot CLI and other enhancements.
GitHub Copilot for JetBrains now includes persistent memory to retain context across sessions, local model access via Ollama, enhanced enterprise controls, and improved chat workflows with better MCP server reliability.
You can now convert existing branch protection rules to repository rulesets directly from repository settings, enabling a migration to GitHub's more flexible and scalable policy framework.
GitHub will deprecate the MAI-Code-1-Flash model across all GitHub Copilot experiences on September 10, 2026, with MAI-Code-1.1-Flash as the suggested alternative. Users should update their workflows accordingly.
GitHub Copilot now includes MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, Microsoft's improved coding model with native vision support for image understanding and enhanced coding quality.
GitHub usage reports now provide a detailed per-model breakdown of tokens consumed by AI credits, showing input, output, and cache metrics for each model. This gives users better visibility into their AI spending patterns.
Copilot Chat on github.com now includes easier access to recent conversations and the ability to minimize the chat interface, improving usability for web-based interactions.
GitHub customers in India can now use saved credit cards for automatic recurring payments on monthly and annual bills via payment mandate.
GitHub is removing support for custom thread subscription settings in notifications, eliminating the ability to configure subscriptions on individual threads.
Weekly updates to GitHub Copilot across desktop, CLI, and VS Code with improvements to resume/organize work, review changes, and contextual questioning capabilities.
Enterprise owners can now install public GitHub Apps created outside their enterprise on their enterprise account, enabling third-party integrators to build apps for enterprise management scenarios.
The Copilot impact dashboard now includes a "Potential return on investment" section that connects spending on Copilot to pull request output metrics, helping users understand the value they're getting from the tool.
GitHub Copilot code review now offers Lite and Balanced effort levels, allowing users to match review depth to code complexity and risk. These effort levels are now generally available.
The Copilot usage metrics API now includes activity data from agent apps running in GitHub workflows, allowing teams to track usage of partner agents like Claude and Codex.
GitHub is expanding issue relationships with the new "Relates to" link type and making multi-select fields generally available across issues and projects, enabling better connection and organization of related work.
Secret scanning expands coverage with more secrets blocked by push protection, a new partner integration (Lovable Labs), and enhanced alert metadata for better visibility and control.
GitHub Code Quality no longer automatically creates a ruleset that requests code review from GitHub Copilot when enabled on a repository.
Enterprise owners can now centrally control which Model Context Protocol servers GitHub Copilot clients are allowed to run using new allowedMcpServers and deniedMcpServers configuration keys.
You can now configure pull request limits at the organization level to define how many open pull requests users without write access can have simultaneously.
Kimi K3, an open-weight model with frontier-level agentic coding capabilities, is now generally available in GitHub Copilot at cost-effective pricing and hosted by GitHub.
You can now apply your own configuration file to code scanning default setup using the github-codeql-config-file repository property, giving you control over how CodeQL scans your code.
The GitHub Copilot Billing Preview app has been retired and is no longer available. Users can now review and manage Copilot spending directly through GitHub's billing settings.
GitHub Spark will no longer accept new users or allow creation of new apps starting August 4, 2026. Existing users can continue accessing GitHub Spark until August 31, 2026.
You can now customize the branch names that Dependabot creates for pull requests using new pull-request-branch-name options in .github/dependabot.yml, including settings for prefix, maximum length, segment separators, and word separators.
GitHub now automatically generates code coverage workflows using AI in the Code Quality settings, making setup faster and simpler for users.
CodeQL, the static analysis engine for GitHub code scanning, now supports Swift 6.3.3 and Kotlin 2.4.10. This expands the language coverage for finding and remediating security issues in your code.
GitHub Copilot cloud agent now supports customizable reasoning levels for compatible models, allowing you to control the depth of analysis when delegating tasks.
Enterprise administrators can now customize managed settings by targeting specific enterprise teams with itemized configuration files, enabling large organizations to scale governance without centralizing all configuration changes through a single team.
You can now create Copilot cloud agent automations that run when issue or pull request comments are created, enabling use cases like automatic documentation generation and other comment-triggered workflows.
Users with the triage role can now create issues in repositories that restrict issue creation to collaborators only. Previously, this restriction only allowed users with write access.
GitHub Enterprise Importer now supports migrations from GitLab.com and GitLab Self-Managed to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, available as a self-serve tool for enterprises looking to switch platforms.
GitHub is deprecating select models across all GitHub Copilot experiences including Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions effective September 1st, 2026. Users should prepare to migrate to supported models.
GitHub Copilot has deprecated Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash models across all experiences including Chat, inline edits, and code completions as of July 31, 2026.
Enterprise teams can now target and configure AI model policies for their organizations in public preview. This enables fine-grained control over which AI models are available and their usage policies at the team level.
npm granular access tokens configured to bypass 2FA can no longer perform sensitive account, organization, and package management actions. These operations now require an interactive 2FA challenge for enhanced security.
GitHub Models has been retired as of July 30, 2026. The playground, model catalog, inference API, and bring your own key functionality are no longer available to any customer.
You can now reference actions or reusable workflows in the same repository using new self-repository syntax with the $/ prefix in uses values, simplifying internal workflow composition.
Stacked pull requests break large changes into small, reviewable pull requests organized as an ordered series, allowing developers to structure changes into focused layers for better review and collaboration.
GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio received updates in July 2026 including a new agent based on the Copilot SDK, built-in expertise from .NET and Azure teams, and new customization options to tailor the experience to individual developers.
Enterprises and organizations can now restrict which devices are eligible to host remotely controlled Copilot sessions, giving administrators fine-grained control over where remote control access is permitted.
GitHub Copilot improvements across VS Code v1.127-v1.131 enhance agent workflows, change review capabilities, chat functionality, and code navigation experiences.
Copilot code review support for agent skills and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers is now generally available for all Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise users, expanding code review capabilities.
GitHub is introducing a global default enablement policy for generally available Copilot models on Business and Enterprise plans, eliminating the need for admins to manually enable each new model.
CodeQL 2.26.1 enhances static analysis accuracy and expands framework coverage for Go and other languages, improving GitHub's code scanning capabilities for security vulnerability detection.
Copilot app usage is now reported across the Copilot usage metrics API, with individual Copilot app activity attributed to users in enterprise-user and organization-user reports.
npm now automatically scans packages at publish time for malware and requires new dual-use metadata to improve supply-chain security. Publishers will need to comply with the new metadata requirements when publishing packages.
xAI's Grok 4.5 reasoning model is now rolling out in GitHub Copilot, enabling fast agentic coding and complex multi-step workflows with an expanded context window.
GitHub Advisory Database now ingests malware advisories from the OpenSSF malicious-packages repository, expanding the breadth of malware detection available through Dependabot alerts across more package ecosystems.
GitHub is implementing a security feature that requires approval for potentially malicious GitHub Actions workflows to protect public repositories from supply chain attacks that compromise CI/CD credentials.
GitHub Copilot for JetBrains now offers enhanced control over telemetry configuration and model management, including support for connecting MCP servers and custom agents in Claude agent flows.
GitHub Copilot app now has its own dedicated policy for controlling access at the enterprise and organization levels, providing more granular access management.
Enterprises can now govern the GitHub Copilot app and Copilot cloud agent using centrally managed policies, extending the same enterprise controls used across Copilot to these additional surfaces.
Claude Opus 5, Anthropic's newest Opus model, is now available in GitHub Copilot for complex, long-running coding tasks that require careful reasoning and effective tool use.
GitHub's Copilot cloud agent is now generally available for Linear integration, allowing users to assign issues to an asynchronous autonomous agent that can analyze and work on issue contents.
The GitHub MCP Server now supports the latest MCP protocol specification, which transitions to a stateless core architecture ahead of the official July 28, 2026 release date.
GitHub Mobile now integrates with Copilot's coding agent to investigate and automatically fix failing GitHub Actions checks directly from your pull request.
Multi-select fields are now available in public preview, allowing users to tag items with multiple values in a single field for better categorization and organization.
GitHub Issues now shows the reason behind agent-driven automation changes like labeling, typing, assigning, and closing issues, and lets users review them before application for better control and transparency.
GitHub released a new metrics impact dashboard for Copilot that enables enterprise administrators and organization owners to gain deeper insights into Copilot's usage and impact across their teams.
GitHub will begin rejecting certain support bundle uploads on August 18, 2026, due to a security change affecting GitHub Enterprise Server.
GitHub Copilot now supports Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash model, designed for web and app development, coding, and agentic tasks with configurable options.
You can now manage a cost center's AI credit pool directly in the billing UI, making it easier to control AI spending without leaving the cost center creation and editing interface.
Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users can now view their AI credit consumption for the current billing cycle from the GitHub Copilot usage dashboard, providing visibility into usage regardless of individual budget settings.
GitHub Code Quality, an AI-powered feature for analyzing and improving code, is now generally available on GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Team to address quality challenges in AI-accelerated development.
The Copilot usage metrics REST API now reports repository-level activity with two new endpoints providing daily, per-repository breakdowns of pull request activity for Copilot coding agent and code review.
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