After launching for individual users and educators, GitHub’s intelligent coding assistant, Copilot, is now available as a plan for enterprises. Called GitHub Copilot for Business, this new plan offers all the features of the single-license Copilot tier along with corporate licensing and policy controls.
Cost and Features
The GitHub Copilot for Business plan costs $19 per user per month, which includes:
- All the features in the single-license Copilot tier
- Corporate licensing and policy controls
- A toggle that lets IT admins prevent suggested code that matches public code on GitHub from being shown to developers
Background: How Copilot Works
Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex, developed by OpenAI, which has been trained on billions of lines of public code. This allows Copilot to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code.
In August 2022, GitHub reported that over 400,000 users had subscribed to Copilot. The service can surface a programming approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g., "Say hello world").
Code Training Data: A Concern
At least a portion of the code on which Codex was trained is copyrighted or under a restrictive license, which has raised concerns among advocacy groups. Users have been able to prompt Copilot to generate code from Quake, code snippets in personal codebases, and example code from books like "Mastering JavaScript" and "Think JavaScript."
GitHub admits that about 1% of the time, Copilot suggestions contain code snippets longer than ~150 characters that match the training data.
Fair Use and Copyright Controversy
GitHub claims that fair use – the doctrine in U.S. law that permits the use of copyrighted material without first having to obtain permission from the rights holder – protects it in the event that Copilot was knowingly or unknowingly developed against copyrighted code.
However, not everyone agrees with this stance. The Free Software Foundation has called Copilot "unacceptable and unjust." A class action lawsuit is also being pursued by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI for allegedly violating copyright law by allowing Copilot to regurgitate sections of licensed code without providing credit.
Potential Risks for Companies
Some legal experts have argued that Copilot could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software. As Elaine Atwell notes in a piece on Kolide’s corporate blog, because Copilot strips code of its licenses, it’s difficult to tell which code is permissible to deploy and which might have incompatible terms of use.
Filter Introduced by GitHub
In June 2022, GitHub introduced a filter that checks code suggestions with their surrounding code against the training data. This filter aims to prevent copyrighted code from being suggested in situations where it would infringe on someone’s rights.
However, this filter is not foolproof and may still allow some copyrighted code to be suggested.
Conclusion
The introduction of GitHub Copilot for Business offers enterprises a convenient way to utilize AI-powered coding assistance. However, the code training data concerns and potential risks associated with using Copilot should not be ignored.
By understanding these issues and taking steps to mitigate them, developers can use Copilot effectively while minimizing the risk of copyright infringement.
Related News
- Apple pauses AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts: Aisha Malik
- Nvidia releases more tools and guardrails to nudge enterprises to adopt AI agents: Rebecca Szkutak
- Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol: Sarah Perez
