GitHub Begins Training Copilot on Free and Pro User Data (April 2026)

GitHub on April 24, 2026 began using interaction data — prompts, completions, code snippets and surrounding context — from Copilot Free, Pro and Pro+ subscribers to train future versions of its AI models, after a 30-day opt-out window quietly closed. GitHub announced the policy change in March, but the activation date passed with little additional fanfare from the company — and developer reaction across Hacker News and Reddit has been overwhelmingly negative.

What Happened

The change is rooted in a privacy statement and terms-of-service update GitHub published on March 25, 2026. From April 24 onward, GitHub treats Copilot interaction data from individual-tier subscribers as eligible training material by default, unless the user explicitly disables “Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training” under /settings/copilot/features. Users who had previously opted out of data collection for product improvements have had that preference preserved.

Copilot Business and Enterprise customers are exempt — GitHub said in its FAQ that those agreements explicitly forbid using interaction data for model training, and the company will continue to honor those terms. The update also does not change GitHub's stance on private repository contents at rest: code stored in private repos is still excluded from training, even though prompts and completions generated while working inside a private repo now are not.

Key Details

• Effective date: April 24, 2026, after roughly a 30-day notice window from the March 25 announcement.
• Tiers affected: Copilot Free, Pro and Pro+ — including individual subscribers using personal-tier licenses inside companies.
• Tiers exempt: Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise.
• Opt-out path: github.com/settings/copilot/features → uncheck “Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training” under the Privacy heading.
• Data covered: prompts, generated completions, code snippets, file context and Copilot Chat conversations — not the underlying source code stored in your private repositories.

What Developers Are Saying

Reaction has been broadly hostile. The official GitHub community discussion announcing the change collected dozens of negative comments and 59 thumbs-down reactions in the first weeks, with only GitHub VP of developer relations Martin Woodward defending the move. On Reddit's r/ExperiencedDevs and r/programming, the most upvoted threads describe the opt-out flow as a dark pattern — the toggle is buried two clicks deep in account settings, with no in-product banner.

The Register summarised the developer mood bluntly: “GitHub: We going to train on your data after all.” InfoQ noted three recurring concerns: developers worried about IP exposure when individuals on personal-tier licenses use Copilot at work, questions about GDPR compliance for EU-based users, and broader fears of model collapse as AI-generated code gets fed back into training pipelines. GitLab's developer-relations team published a blog post calling it a “governance wake-up call” for any organisation that has been ignoring shadow Copilot Pro use.

What This Means for Developers

If you use Copilot Free, Pro or Pro+ and you missed the April 24 cut-off, your interaction data is being collected for training right now — but the opt-out is retroactive in effect: turning the toggle off stops future collection, even though it cannot recall data already ingested. Anyone using a personal-tier Copilot license in a workplace context should treat this as an immediate compliance issue: the opt-out is enforced at the user level, not the organisation level, so a single team member who never flips the switch can expose proprietary code through Copilot interactions.

For organisations: GitHub's official guidance is to upgrade affected users to Copilot Business or Enterprise, which carry contractual no-training guarantees. For individual developers who want to keep using the free or Pro tier without contributing training data, the opt-out toggle remains available indefinitely — and toggling it off has no effect on Copilot's actual functionality.

What's Next

GitHub has not published a roadmap for what model improvements the new training data will enable, but Microsoft and OpenAI have both signalled an interest in training Copilot's next-generation models on richer real-world IDE interactions rather than scraped public code. Expect EU regulators to scrutinise the GDPR posture of opt-out-by-default training, and expect a new wave of audit-trail and DLP tooling from third parties pitching themselves at organisations that have lost track of personal Copilot licences inside their estate.

Sources

• GitHub Blog: Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy — primary source from the company.
• GitHub Changelog: Privacy statement and terms-of-service update (March 25, 2026)
• GitHub Community FAQ & discussion #188488 — community reaction.
• The Register: GitHub: We going to train on your data after all
• InfoQ: GitHub Will Use Copilot Interaction Data from Free, Pro, and Pro+ Users to Train AI Models
• Hacker News: If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
• GitLab Blog: GitHub Copilot's policy for AI training: A governance wake-up call