GitHub Copilot for Business plans unveiled

GitHub has unveiled business usage terms for its GitHub Copilot AI-based coding assistant, making the service available to businesses for $19 per month per user. The company also vowed to keep users’ own code safe from retention, storage, or sharing by GitHub.

GitHub Copilot for Business gives organizations license management, organization-wide policy controls, and privacy features along with licenses for organizations, teams, and individual users. GitHub Copilot, introduced in 2021 as a Visual Studio Code editor extension, offers coding suggestions and functions directly from the user’s programming editor or IDE. The AI model behind Copilot is trained on open source code in public repositories.

GitHub Copilot recently drew a lawsuit that alleges GitHub violated the rights of content creators and enabled software piracy. Prior to that, the Free Software Foundation objected to Copilot, questioning its legitimacy and fairness. In the tool’s defense, GitHub says Copilot has helped redefine productivity for more than a million developers, boasting that it synthesizes as much as 40% of code. For researchers, GitHub has helped users code 55% faster, GitHub said.

GitHub for Business includes the following capabilities for organizations:

• For code safety, GitHub will not retain code snippets or store or share users’ code regardless if the data is from public repositories, private repositories, or local files. This, despite the tool itself being trained on billions of lines of publicly available code.
• The ability for administrators to select which organizations, teams, and developers receive licenses.
• Policy controls that allow administrators to enforce user settings for public code matching on behalf of an organization.

Developers interested in using GitHub Copilot can contact GitHub. Copilot works with Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs. GitHub announced general availability of Copilot in June. Pricing for individual users is $10 per month or $100 per year.