GitHub Copilot

GitHub retired the flat-rate premium requests model for GitHub Copilot in June 2026 and moved to per-token billing, over user protests. Paul Sawers, writing in The New Stack on 16 June 2026, set that against Anthropic's decision to pause an equivalent change to Claude Agent SDK billing on the very day it was due to take effect. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, had argued in April that subscriptions "weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools". GitHub reached the same conclusion and absorbed the backlash rather than reversing.

Menlo Ventures' December 2025 enterprise report supplies the competitive frame in numbers: AI-native startups hold 63% of the application market and 71% in Product & Engineering, the segment where the report names Cursor against GitHub Copilot. Coding is the largest departmental category at 4 billion dollars, 55% of departmental AI spend.

Sam Schillace, in September 2025, described high-output "compounding teams" that pointedly do not use basic AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot. They build frameworks around the models instead, run five to ten parallel processes, and some have not touched code directly in months. Mitch Ashley reports that Microsoft examined acquiring Cursor and set it aside, which he reads as a trade between integration cost and channel conflict with GitHub Copilot. Microsoft holds the incumbent product and the enterprise distribution; the teams Schillace watched had already moved past the tool.