Expanded Agent Access

GitHub is expanding access to Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) as coding agents for Copilot Business and Copilot Pro users. Previously limited to Enterprise and Pro+ tiers, this rollout makes multi-agent capabilities available to more development teams while maintaining a single premium request per session during the public preview phase.

Unified Platform and Governance

All three agents—Claude, Codex, and Copilot—now run on a shared platform within GitHub, providing:

• Shared context: Access to repository code, history, issues, pull requests, Copilot Memory, and repository instructions
• Enterprise controls: Centralized governance through the Agent Control Plane (now generally available) with policy management and audit logging
• Cross-surface availability: Use agents consistently across github.com, GitHub Mobile, and VS Code with persistent session history

How to Enable and Use

For Copilot Pro users: Enable Claude and/or Codex directly in Copilot coding agent settings with per-repository access controls.

For Copilot Business users: Admins must enable agents at both enterprise and organization levels via Enterprise AI Controls.

Agent capabilities include starting sessions within repositories, assigning agents to issues and pull requests for autonomous work, and running agents in VS Code with three modes: Local (fast interactive help), Cloud (autonomous GitHub-hosted tasks), and Background (asynchronous local tasks, Copilot only).

Agents produce draft, reviewable artifacts that integrate into existing pull request workflows. Mention @copilot, @claude, or @codex in pull request comments to request updates or assign multiple agents to the same issue to compare approaches.