Image: GitHub / github.blog GitHub Copilot Enterprise Now Lets Admins Assign AI Models by Team
A new public preview rolling out to most enterprise customers on August 3 lets AI admins grant specific Copilot models to individual teams rather than setting one policy for the whole organization. The Copilot Billing Preview app also retired today.
GitHub started rolling out enterprise teams model policy targeting for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise customers on August 3. The feature, in public preview, lets AI administrators set model access at the team level rather than only at the organization level.
How it works
Admins set a baseline policy across the whole enterprise, then designate additional models as “Optional.” Those models can then be assigned to specific enterprise teams — giving frontier model access to a security team or an ML team while keeping other groups on a more restricted set.
Three access states are available for each model:
- Enabled — available to everyone in the enterprise
- Disabled — available to no one
- Optional — assignable to specific enterprise teams
The system uses a least-restrictive evaluation: if a user gets access to a model through any team they belong to, that access applies across their entire enterprise account. Membership in a more permissive team upgrades access; leaving that team removes it.
Why this matters now
Copilot’s model roster has expanded considerably in 2026. Enterprise customers can currently choose from Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Grok 4.5, Kimi K2.7 Code, and others — each with different costs, capabilities, and risk profiles. A blanket org-level policy that enables or disables models for everyone is increasingly blunt as that roster grows.
Team-level targeting lets organizations give frontier model access to teams that need it for specific work (agent pipelines, complex debugging, code generation at scale) while staying on lower-cost defaults for everyone else. It also makes early access experiments more contained — a small team can test a new model without it being available to the whole organization.
Getting started
Admins can prepare before enabling teams mode by creating enterprise teams and assigning optional models in advance. GitHub recommends a gradual migration from organization-level settings. Opting out during the preview period returns the organization to its previous configuration.
Also on August 3: the Copilot Billing Preview app retired and was replaced by GitHub’s native billing settings, which now cover Copilot usage directly.
Sources: GitHub Changelog (July 31) · GitHub Changelog (default model enablement)