GitHub launches the Copilot App — an agent-native desktop where every session runs in its own worktree

At Microsoft Build 2026 on June 2, 2026, GitHub introduced the GitHub Copilot App — a dedicated desktop application built around running and supervising AI coding agents, rather than a panel bolted into an editor. It is GitHub's clearest statement yet that agentic coding has outgrown the inline-suggestion model: the app is designed for developers who are increasingly orchestrating multiple agents at once rather than accepting one completion at a time.

What the Copilot App is. The app centres on a "My Work" view that shows work in motion across your connected repositories — active agent sessions, issues, pull requests, and background automations — in one place. The defining technical decision: every agent session runs in its own isolated Git worktree, so multiple agents can operate on the same codebase in parallel without stepping on each other. GitHub also introduced "Canvases" — bidirectional work surfaces where a plan, a pull request, a browser session, a terminal, a deployment, or a workflow state becomes something you can inspect, steer, and verify alongside the agent.

Availability. The Copilot App is in technical preview as of Build, available to existing Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. It runs on Windows 11 (including Windows 11 on Arm), macOS, and Linux. There is no separate price — it is part of the existing Copilot subscription tiers.

The Copilot SDK is now generally available. Alongside the app, GitHub announced general availability of the GitHub Copilot SDK across Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET, Rust, and Java. The SDK exposes the same agentic runtime that powers the Copilot App, meaning developers can build their own tools and integrations on the runtime GitHub uses itself. For teams building internal developer tooling or commercial products on top of Copilot, this is the more durable announcement: a stable, multi-language interface to the agent runtime.

On the model side. The confirmed model-related change at Build was narrow: GPT-4.1 was deprecated as a selectable model on June 2. Copilot's model selector continues to expose multiple model families on paid plans, and nothing about that selection or about Copilot's pricing changed with the Copilot App launch.

For Copilot users today. If you are on a paid Copilot plan, the Copilot App is available to try now in technical preview — the isolated-worktree-per-session design is the feature most worth testing if you've run into agents colliding on a shared branch. Nothing about Copilot's pricing or the AI Credits billing system that went live June 1 changes with this announcement. See the best AI coding tools roundup for how it sits against Cursor and Claude Code.