GitHub flips Copilot models to on by default

GitHub switched Copilot's model enablement policy on July 29, making new models available by default for Business and Enterprise customers, per the company's changelog.

Admins who assumed new models stayed off until someone approved them have to work backward from here. One opt-out control replaces per-model approval, so the default state changed from locked to open.

The timing is the tell. GitHub rolled out Grok 4.5 to Copilot on July 28 and required manual enablement per organization, the gated posture Business and Enterprise admins expected.

One day later, that flipped. Any model reaching general availability in Copilot ships on by default under the July 29 policy, and organizations get a single setting to opt back into the stricter, gated behavior.

That's a real shift in who decides what code-generation model your engineers use day to day. Before July 29, a security or platform team chose when to turn a model on. Under the new policy, GitHub chooses, and the team has to notice and turn it off.

The Grok 4.5 sequence suggests manual approval was the exception, not GitHub's new normal for model rollouts in Copilot.