GitHub Copilot

GitHub withdrew the flat-rate premium requests model from Copilot in June 2026 and moved to per-token billing, despite protests. Paul Sawers, writing in The New Stack on 16 June 2026, sets that beside Anthropic pausing its own Agent SDK billing split on the day it was due to take effect: GitHub reached the same conclusion about flat plans and open-ended agentic usage, and owned it publicly.

The competitive readings are unflattering. Menlo Ventures' 2025 enterprise report puts AI-native vendors at 71% of Product & Engineering spend, and names «Cursor» as the vendor facing «GitHub Copilot» in that department. Sam Schillace, writing in September 2025 about the compounding teams he had observed, says those teams do not use basic AI coding assistants like «GitHub Copilot» at all. They build frameworks around the models and work through git, markdown and Kubernetes instead.

What holds is distribution. Mitch Ashley reads Microsoft's reported look at acquiring «Cursor», then declining, as an arbitrage between integration cost and channel conflict with «GitHub Copilot». Daniel Meppiel, who works with enterprise engineering teams at Microsoft and GitHub, made the native base his first entry point for starting an agentic SDLC on 1 October 2026: «Copilot Code Review» enabled centrally across repositories, Coding Agent, Enterprise Managed Plugins shipped without individual installation. Microsoft Copilot's plugin registry governs plugins for Microsoft 365 today, with «GitHub Copilot» support listed as planned. The defense, on this account, is the enterprise estate the product already occupies.