GitHub Copilot · Model availability

How fast do new AI models reach GitHub Copilot?

Every time a frontier model ships, someone asks how long until it lands in Copilot. This measures the gap between a vendor’s public release and the model showing up in GitHub Copilot, across 46 launches from September 2024 to August 2026.

Built from public sources only — vendor announcements and the GitHub Changelog. Data last generated —.

Lag is measured in calendar days from the vendor’s public announcement to the first date the model was selectable in GitHub Copilot (public preview counted as available).

The short answer

For frontier models from major labs, the lag is usually zero. GitHub is a launch partner with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, so flagship models tend to appear in Copilot the same day the vendor announces them — sometimes before.

Lag shows up in two specific places: sub-variants that ship after the headline model (Codex-Max, mini tiers), and vendors GitHub isn’t a launch partner with, where integration starts only after public release.

Lag over time

Each point is one model launch. Anything on the zero line shipped in Copilot the same day it was announced.

How quickly are models available?

Share of launches available in Copilot within N days of the vendor’s announcement.

By vendor

Launch-partner status is the dominant variable. It shows up cleanly here.

Vendor	Launches	Same day	Median	Mean	Same-day rate

Trend by half-year

The pipeline got dramatically faster after 2024, then held steady. Since 2025 the mean has stayed in low single-digit days.

Period	Launches	Same day	Median	Mean	Same-day rate

Every launch

Both dates are linked to their source. Sort any column; search filters model and vendor.

Model	Vendor	Vendor release	In Copilot	Lag	Stage

Method & caveats

Vendor date is the public announcement date from the vendor’s own blog or newsroom, not an API model-ID snapshot date. Snapshot strings like claude-opus-4-5-20251101 are training cutoffs and do not indicate release.
Copilot date is the first GitHub Changelog entry announcing availability in Copilot. Where a model shipped to public preview first, the preview date is used — that is when users could actually pick it. From early 2026 onward GitHub largely stopped using a preview stage and ships straight to GA.
Negative lag is real. Grok Code Fast 1 was available in Copilot as the stealth model “sonic” two days before xAI announced it publicly.
Rollout is not instantaneous across surfaces. A model reaching VS Code on day 0 may reach Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, and Eclipse days later. This tracks first availability, not full fleet coverage.
Some vendor dates are genuinely ambiguous — experimental versus GA, partner preview versus public launch. Rows where that choice materially affects the number carry a footnote in the table above.
This is an independent analysis of public data. It is not a GitHub commitment, roadmap, or service-level agreement, and it does not predict future releases.

Data

Take it and do something better with it: data.json · data.csv · build.py