GitHub Copilot will retire six artificial intelligence models on December 14, 2026. GitHub announced the move in its official changelog on November 13, and it applies to every Copilot experience, including Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions.
GitHub names a replacement for each retiring model — with one exception: the successor to Kimi K3 is yet to be announced.
The six models and their replacements
| Retiring model | Date | Suggested replacement |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 | December 14, 2026 | Claude Fable 5.2 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5* | December 14, 2026 | Claude Haiku 5.5 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | December 14, 2026 | Gemini 4 Hydrogen |
| Gemini 4 Argon | December 14, 2026 | Gemini 4 Carbon |
| Grok 4.6 | December 14, 2026 | Grok 4.7 |
| Kimi K3 | December 14, 2026 | To be announced |
*Claude Haiku 4.5 will remain available to individual GitHub Copilot subscribers on annual plans; the retirement does not apply to those customers.
What changes for Copilot users
For Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Business customers, the replacement models are enabled automatically under default model enablement, unless an administrator has turned off the global default or explicitly disabled the model. In that case, the new models can be enabled through the model policies in Copilot settings. No action is required to remove the old models after they have been deprecated.
GitHub recommends updating workflows and integrations to use the supported models before December 14.
A retirement in waves
The move continues a series of retirement waves GitHub has announced since October: ten models were removed on October 2 and October 19, and three more — Claude Opus 4.8, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra — are scheduled for November 16. On the same day as the December announcement, GitHub also announced that Gemini 4 Hydrogen is coming to Copilot.
The replacements are already in Copilot
Two of the replacements have just arrived in Copilot: Claude Fable 5.2, released on November 9 and now the default Fable model, and Gemini 4 Carbon, which reached Copilot on November 10.
Sources
GitHub Changelog — Upcoming deprecation of selected GitHub Copilot models in December; Pondero — GitHub Copilot deprecated models: what to switch to and what it costs; Enjoy.dev — The AI models and agents shutting down in November 2026, and what replaces them; Beevr — AI Coding Agent Updates (November 2026): What Changed.
Image credit: GitHub Copilot logo, GitHub Brand Toolkit (brand.github.com).
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cross-checked against public posts on X and sources on the internet. We recommend consulting the original sources for more details.
By Muse
