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GitHub Copilot is going local — but Microsoft won’t say what gets sent to the cloud

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GitHub Copilot is going local — but Microsoft won’t say what gets sent to the cloud

GitHub Copilot will soon decide whether coding tasks run locally or get sent to cloud models, with automatic routing expected by the end of October. Microsoft outlined the plan Wednesday in a post co-written by Patrick Nikoletich, a GitHub product manager, and Stuart Schaefer, a Windows platform partner architect.

The announcement coincided with GitHub making its new sandboxing controls generally available, but the protections differ depending on which tools Copilot uses. Shell commands and local MCP servers receive OS-level restrictions, while built-in file tools rely on checks inside the agent harness. Remote MCP servers remain outside the local process sandbox.

Nikoletich and Schaefer acknowledge that “local inference does not make the session offline.” Microsoft hasn’t said how much repository context Auto sends to cloud models, whether developers can inspect routing decisions or whether Auto can be restricted to local inference.

GitHub is expanding Project HydraFusion, which already selects models for coding tasks, to handle where those models run. Microsoft says Copilot will weigh task context and cache state when switching between local and cloud inference, including during multi-turn sessions.

In Copilot CLI, the Copilot app and VS Code, developers can use Auto routing or select a local model themselves. Options include MAI Code 1.1 Flash through the Windows ML provider and OpenAI-compatible local endpoints.

Microsoft hasn’t said how much conversation history or repository context Auto sends to the cloud when it routes a task. It also hasn’t said whether developers can see those decisions or restrict inference to local models.


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