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The business version of the popular code generation service features AI upgrades.

This week Microsoft’s GitHub announced that it has made Copilot for business generally available. Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps developers write code faster by drawing context from natural language comments and code snippets to “instantly” suggest individual lines and even whole functions.

Copilot was made generally available back in July of 2022. The tool is powered by the artificial intelligence model OpenAI Codex which was trained on tens of millions of public repositories. GitHub first announced the business version of Copilot back in November. The launch has had some legal hiccups as GitHub , Microsoft and OpenAI are fighting a lawsuit over possible copyright abuse.

New features available for the business launch

GitHub has added several new features to Copilot for Business. GitHub claims these features will help developers write code faster and more easily detect software vulnerabilities. For example, the Copilot for Business generates software code using an AI model called Codex. The company says that developers can write a text prompt describing a software task and have Codex automatically generate the code necessary to perform that task. Additionally, the AI model supports multiple programming languages.

The business version of Copilot offer “simple” license management. This means that administrators can enable GitHub Copilot for their teams and select which organizations, teams, and developers receive licenses. The service also offers organization-wide policy management: Admins can set policy controls to enforce user settings for public code matching on behalf of their organization.

There is also business-level security: “Your code is safe with us”, GitHub says. “With Copilot for Business, we won’t retain code snippets, store or share your code regardless if the data is from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories, or local files”.

Enhanced Visual Studio integration

GitHub has also enhanced the VS Code integration with a feature that collects data about developers’ workflow, such as how often they dismiss recommendations made by Copilot for Business. It then uses this data to find ways of providing better code suggestions.