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GitHub Is About to Train On Your Code — Unless You Say No First
Every Copilot user just got an email. Most of them won't act on it before the deadline.
GitHub sent an email this week notifying Copilot users of a policy change taking effect April 24th. Starting that date, your interactions with Copilot — inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context — will be used to train AI models by default.
You have until April 24th to opt out. After that, silence is consent.
What Changed
This isn't a new capability — it's a default flip. GitHub is moving from opt-in to opt-out for Copilot interaction data used in AI training. The email is careful with its language: "your preference has been retained" if you previously opted out, and you can "choose whether to allow" your data to be used. What it doesn't say plainly: if you do nothing, you're in.
The email also name-drops the justification: "We have tested this with Microsoft interaction data and have seen meaningful improvements." Translation — Microsoft already ran this on its own employees, liked the results, and is now expanding it to the paying user base. Your code is the next dataset.
The opt-out path is three clicks: Settings → Copilot → toggle. It takes 30 seconds. But it requires knowing this email exists and understanding what it's actually saying.
The Bigger Picture
This is the Training Tax in action — the pattern where the cost of using an AI tool isn't just the subscription fee, it's the behavioral data the tool collects to improve itself. GitHub is hardly alone here. OpenAI, Google, and others have all navigated versions of this conversation. What makes this one notable is the directness: a formal email, a named deadline, a clear opt-out path. That's more than most vendors offer.
But the framing is worth paying attention to. "Aligns with established industry practices" is doing real work in that sentence. It's accurate — and it's also the thing that should make developers stop and think about how many of their tools have already quietly normalized this without the courtesy of an email.
What This Means for You
If you're using Copilot on client code, proprietary projects, or anything you'd rather not contribute to a shared model — go opt out now. The deadline is April 24th, and the setting is under GitHub Account Settings → Copilot.
If you're evaluating whether this trade is worth it, that's a fair question. The short version: you're already paying for the tool. Whether you also want to pay with your work is a separate decision — and now you have until April 24th to make it.
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Trish @ StackDrift
