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GitHub Copilot is the umbrella product that includes inline code completions, Copilot Chat, and Agent Mode in the IDE. The Copilot coding agent is a specific asynchronous agent you assign to a GitHub issue; it runs in a sandboxed GitHub Actions environment, makes code changes on a branch, and opens a pull request for human review.
Copilot routes requests across multiple frontier models, including OpenAI's GPT family, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet and Opus, and Google's Gemini. Users on paid plans can typically pick a model per chat or agent task, and organization admins can restrict which models are available.
GitHub states that prompts and suggestions from Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers are not used to train foundation models. Behavior on the free and individual plans has changed over time, so review the current GitHub Copilot Trust Center documentation before relying on it for sensitive code.
Inline completions, Chat, and Agent Mode work in supported IDEs against any local code, regardless of where it is hosted. The asynchronous Copilot coding agent and PR-based features, however, require the repository to be on GitHub.
Copilot supports the Model Context Protocol, letting teams expose internal APIs, databases, documentation, and custom tools to the agent so it can take actions and pull context beyond the repository. MCP servers can be configured at the user, repository, or organization level.
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Last verified March 2026