GitHub Copilot

You own the code — and the Business tier protects you

A recurring fear about AI coding assistants is "who owns the suggestion?" For Copilot the answer is clear: you own and are responsible for the code Copilot produces. The more meaningful distinction is between tiers. On the individual tiers — Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ — your interactions may be used to train models unless you opt out in settings. Business and Enterprise never train on prompts and add IP indemnification — Microsoft will defend you against certain copyright claims arising from suggestions.

Practical implications

• For company use, Business or Enterprise is the correct tier — not just for privacy, but for the indemnity, and because training is off and cannot be enabled. Individual tiers lack the indemnity and are opt-out for training.
• A duplication-detection filter can be enabled to suppress suggestions that match public code verbatim; turn it on if license hygiene matters.
• Copilot has no standalone API. It is consumed inside IDEs, the CLI, and chat — you cannot call it programmatically like a model API.

When to choose it

Copilot is the default in-editor assistant for teams already on GitHub. If you want raw programmatic model access for custom tooling, use the underlying model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) instead.