Productivity AutomationAugments Human LaborVerified
Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
GitHub Copilot is an AI tool built into coding software that suggests lines of code — or entire functions — as a developer types, acting like an autocomplete that understands programming. It launched in June 2022 and is used by millions of developers worldwide. A more recent "coding agent" version can work through programming tasks on its own, with minimal human input.
Details
GitHub Copilot became generally available June 21, 2022. It was originally powered by OpenAI Codex (a large language model trained on billions of lines of publicly available code), and now supports multiple models including GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini. Copilot Business launched February 2023 and Copilot Enterprise in February 2024. In May 2025, GitHub introduced a coding agent that autonomously works through software issues inside a secure cloud environment. Microsoft reports approximately 40% of code in supported files is AI-generated in popular languages. A class-action copyright lawsuit filed in November 2022 challenges whether training on public code constitutes fair use.
Products affected
GitHub Copilot (IndividualBusinessEnterpriseProPro+)Visual Studio CodeVisual StudioJetBrains IDEsNeovimGitHub.com
Sources & Evidence
Company Disclosure
Other practices by Microsoft
OtherProject InnerEye is a Microsoft Research initiative that uses AI to analyze 3D medical scans — primarily CT scans used for cancer radiotherapy planning — and automatically highlight the areas that need treatment. Peer-reviewed research found it can complete this task up to 13 times faster than a clinician doing it manually, while staying within the range of human expert accuracy.OtherSeeing AI is a free Microsoft app for people who are blind or have low vision. It uses the phone's camera and AI to narrate the world around the user — reading text out loud, identifying products by barcode, describing scenes, and recognizing faces. It launched on iOS in 2017 and became available on Android in December 2023, supporting 18 languages.OtherWindows Recall is an AI feature for Windows 11 that continuously takes screenshots of everything on a user's screen and stores them locally, so the user can later search their own history by typing questions like "find that recipe I was looking at last week." Announced in May 2024, it faced immediate criticism from security and privacy experts and was delayed multiple times before a limited release.
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