Last year in June, GitHub and OpenAI debuted a technical preview of a new AI tool called Copilot, which runs within the Visual Studio Code editor and autocompletes code snippets. Now, months after debuting for individual users and schools, GitHub Copilot is now available in a plan for enterprises.
The new subscription, known as GitHub Copilot for Business, costs $19 per user per month and includes all the capabilities of the Copilot single-license tier in addition to flexible licensing management, organization-wide policy controls, and industry-leading privacy. With the help of this plan, businesses can easily establish policy controls to impose user preferences for public code matching on behalf of their company.
The emergence of AI-assisted coding, according to GitHub’s blog post, will transform how we create software, much like the rise of compilers and open source. Because of this, GitHub has faith in the ability of AI to enhance the developer experience, boost productivity and happiness, and speed up innovation by offering GitHub Copilot to businesses of all sizes with enhanced admin controls.
GitHub wants to offer more tools in 2023 to assist developers to make educated judgments about whether to adopt Copilot’s suggestions, such as the ability to recognize strings matching public code and link to those repositories. Additionally, GitHub asserts that it will not save or distribute code samples for training purposes with GitHub Copilot for Business users, regardless of whether the data originates from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories, or local files.
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This development follows the filing of a class-action lawsuit in a federal court in the US challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex. The lawsuit filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI alleges a breach of open-source licensing and has the potential to significantly influence the artificial intelligence community. The lawsuit was filed by Matthew Butterick, a programmer and lawyer, and the legal firm Joseph Saveri, which specializes in antitrust and class lawsuits.
