A retirement notice, not just a future schedule
GitHub’s October 19 notice says selected models have now been deprecated across most Copilot experiences, including chat, edits, agent work, and completions. The earlier September notice only announced the schedule. This same-day catch-up is for AI geeks and experienced technicians; the exact publication hour is unconfirmed.
The notice recommends Gemini 3.8 Flash instead of Gemini 3.7 Flash; GPT-6.1 Sol instead of GPT-5.5 or GPT-5.4; GPT-6 Luna instead of GPT-5.4 mini or GPT-5 mini; and Grok 4.7 instead of Grok 4.5. Enterprise administrators may need to enable replacement models. GitHub says no manual removal of retired models is required.
There is a source conflict: the dated notice includes Grok 4.5, while GitHub’s current supported-model documentation still labels it generally available. We cannot resolve that difference from these pages. Check your actual model selection and applicable policy rather than assume universal availability.
New administration controls, with scope to check
A separate October 19 announcement makes REST API controls for reading and changing model policies generally available at enterprise, enterprise-team, enterprise-app, and organization levels. These controls manage availability; they do not establish that a replacement behaves identically.
For implementers, the blog and REST documentation use different team identifiers in their example paths. Follow the linked documentation and verify the required scope and permissions before automating changes. We have not tested a Copilot account, these API calls, or a migration.
Our take
R2’s editorial analysis: record the model, Copilot experience, and policy your workflow depends on. After choosing an available replacement, rerun representative tasks and inspect edits, tool actions, and failures. Review proposed changes before applying them; a supported model name is not a promise of correct output.