Big news: GitHub Copilot open source- Microsoft Build 2025 opens with a climax

At 12:00 last night, Microsoft announced at the Build 2025 Developer Conference that GitHub Copilot Extension for VSCode is officially open source; the open source agreement is MIT. This means that developers around the world will be able to obtain the source code of the world's most advanced AI IDE for free, and can work with other developers to improve GitHub Copilot.

In the official statement released by the VSCode team, we can see that Microsoft's plan is to gradually merge the capabilities of GitHub Copilot's main function (Chat Extension), including the source code of the multi-agent coding mode (Agent Mode), into the open source code of VSCode. This means that any tool built based on the VSCode open source code will be able to directly build in the AI ​​Agent capabilities currently provided by GitHub Copilot.

We firmly believe that the future of code editors should be open and driven by artificial intelligence technology. Over the past decade, Visual Studio Code has been one of the most successful open source projects on the GitHub platform. We sincerely thank the vibrant community of contributors and the vast user base who chose VS Code based on its open source nature. As artificial intelligence technology gradually becomes a core component of the VS Code developer experience, we will continue to adhere to the development principles established at the beginning of the project: maintain openness, adhere to a collaborative model, and be driven by community power.

We will open source the code base of the GitHub Copilot Chat extension under the MIT license, and then carefully refactor and integrate the relevant components of the extension into the core VS Code code. This is an inevitable move to promote the evolution of VS Code into an open source artificial intelligence editor, marking that artificial intelligence tools have become a core element of modern programming practice. This move not only reaffirms our core belief that "open collaboration can create better products", but will also further promote the prosperity and development of a diversified extension ecosystem.

Why choose to open source at this moment?

Over the past few months, we have observed significant changes in the development trends in the field of artificial intelligence, which prompted us to decide to move the AI ​​development model in VS Code from closed to open source:

• Significantly improved performance of large language models : The capabilities of current large language models have been greatly optimized, significantly reducing the need to rely on "secret recipe" prompt strategies.

• AI interaction experience tends to be standardized : A consensus has been reached on the most popular and efficient AI interaction user experience design among editors. We hope to enable the community to optimize and expand these common elements by placing relevant UI components in a stable and open code base.

• The open source AI tool ecosystem is mature : The open source AI tool ecosystem around the VS Code extension has been initially formed. The current closed source state of the Copilot Chat extension greatly increases the difficulty for extension developers to build, debug, and test their work.

• Growing demand for data transparency : We have received a large number of inquiries about the data collection mechanisms of the AI ​​Editor. Open sourcing the Copilot Chat extension will allow you to directly review the scope of our data collection, thereby improving system transparency.

• Security threats continue to escalate : Malicious attackers are increasingly targeting AI developer tools. VS Code's history as open source software shows that issues and PRs submitted by the community can help us quickly discover and fix security risks.