Summary: GitHub announced two September waves for Copilot: payment now precedes seat access for new Copilot Business and Enterprise customers paying by credit card or PayPal, while existing card and PayPal accounts move to upfront cycle billing from October 1. From September 28, Copilot Chat and the cloud agent merge into one default-on experience, and chat retention extends from 28 days to the account lifetime. Admins must act before the deadline if they want to opt out or preserve Lite code review.
Two waves of Copilot changes appeared in GitHub’s August 28 changelog, the first arriving September 1, the second on September 28 or later. Because the billing model and the product’s shape shift at once, September becomes a month for enterprise admins to configure, not to wait.
Wave One (Sept 1): Payment Before Access
Sign-ups for new Business and Enterprise customers on credit card or PayPal are open again, now with stricter account vetting and rewritten rules: a freshly assigned seat unlocks only after payment clears. Customers already on credit card or PayPal get a different arrangement starting October 1: every seat’s cost is collected upfront at the start of each billing cycle. Overshooting the included allowance may call for extra payment before use continues, and the allowance itself may be prorated month by month.
Plenty stays put, and that earns a note too: prices hold; revoking a seat mid-term brings no refund; seats added partway through a cycle remain prorated; extra usage is still purchasable; spend controls and usage tracking stick around. Cancel Copilot entirely and come back later, and it “may trigger updated account vetting and billing behaviors.” Model retirements take effect the same day: several Copilot models are discontinued with recommended alternatives published, and GPT-5.3-Codex availability on the Student plan is among the affected items (see the GitHub roadmap). The trajectory reads plainly enough — away from “subscribe to seats, settle later” and toward prepaid seats-plus-usage, matching the industry-wide turn to usage-based billing.
Wave Two (from Sept 28): A Single Experience, Switched On
The bigger shift sits on the product side: Copilot Chat on github.com and in GitHub Mobile, plus Copilot cloud agent, merge into a single experience under one policy, enabled by default. For speed, the cloud agent moves to Sandbox; Copilot on github.com migrates to agent sessions — carrying a data-governance change that is easy to miss: chat data retention stretches from 28 days to “the life of the account.”
What opting out costs is stated plainly: organizations that decline will, after launch, lose Copilot access on github.com and Mobile. Before September 28, admins must review and set the policy by going through the cloud agent option in Copilot settings on github.com.
Another default hides on the same date: Code Review’s default effort level shifts, Lite giving way to Balanced. A repo or organization that wants Lite has to move that setting off Default and onto Lite by hand ahead of September 28 if GitHub is to honor the choice; after the deadline, the Reviewers bar still allows a level to be chosen manually.
Three Things for Admins
- Settle the unified-experience policy: choose enable or opt out explicitly under Copilot settings before Sept 28 — inaction here lets the default decide
- Work through the retention change: chat logs shifting from 28 days to lifetime retention belongs on the compliance checklist of any organization that keeps a data retention policy
- Verify the Code Review default: teams that count on Lite’s lower-friction reviews should lock the setting in before the deadline
Product Observation
What this shift really comes to is GitHub settling its definition of “what is Copilot”: no longer a scatter of features across editor, web, and mobile, but one default-on agent whose core is the agent session. Placed beside pay-first billing, it moves Copilot formally from “assistant plugin” to “infrastructure service” — with governance and billing alike now running on the logic of infrastructure.