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GitHub Copilot Drops Four Models on October 2, Including Claude Opus 4.7 and Two Gemini Flash Versions

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

GitHub published a deprecation notice on September 3 listing four Copilot models that stop working across Chat, inline edits, agent mode, and code completions on October 2, 2026, with named replacements for each.

GitHub Copilot Drops Four Models on October 2, Including Claude Opus 4.7 and Two Gemini Flash Versions

Four models will stop working across GitHub Copilot on October 2, 2026, and replacing them is not automatic. Admins who take no action before that date lose access without gaining the suggested alternatives.

What

GitHub posted a deprecation notice on September 3, per the GitHub Changelog, listing the following models for retirement and their suggested replacements:

  • Gemini 3.5 Flash, replaced by Gemini 3.8 Flash
  • Gemini 3.6 Flash, replaced by Gemini 3.8 Flash
  • Kimi K2.7 Code, replaced by Kimi K3
  • Claude Opus 4.7, replaced by Claude Opus 5

All four will be removed from every Copilot surface on October 2: Chat, inline edits, ask mode, agent mode, and code completions. The scope covers both the GitHub.com web experience and IDE-connected Copilot sessions.

Replacement access is not automatic. Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Business administrators must open their organization or enterprise Copilot settings, verify that each alternative model is listed, and confirm that the model policy enables it. Only after an admin enables the policy will users see the replacement model in the Copilot Chat model selector. After October 2, GitHub states no admin action is needed to remove the deprecated models; they will disappear from the selector without a manual cleanup step.

Why it matters

The October 2 deadline is four weeks out from the September 3 notice. Any Copilot agent mode workflow or Copilot Extension that calls a specific deprecated model by name will break at the cutover unless the integration is updated before then. Chat sessions where users pinned one of the four models in the selector will also lose that configuration without warning.

Teams running Copilot without an explicit model selection are less exposed; those sessions draw from the platform default rather than a named model. But organizations that standardized on Claude Opus 4.7 specifically for its reasoning characteristics, or on either Gemini Flash version for cost reasons, need to evaluate the replacements on their own workloads now. Claude Opus 5 is available in Copilot, per the GitHub Changelog, but admins need to confirm their tier includes it before the cutoff.

The three-step admin checklist: open Copilot settings at the org or enterprise level, enable the replacement model in the model policy, then have at least one developer confirm the model appears in the selector before October 2.

What to watch next

GitHub has not confirmed whether the October 2 cutover applies equally to Copilot Workspace and Copilot Extensions-based integrations, which can bind to specific models through different configuration paths. The other thing to check before October 1: that Claude Opus 5 and Kimi K3 are available on your specific Copilot tier, since availability by tier was not detailed in the September 3 notice.

Sources