Claude Opus 5.5 Goes Generally Available in GitHub Copilot

GitHub has made Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 generally available in Copilot, and the changelog spells out what that means in practice. Users on Copilot Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans can choose the model from the model picker in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode, Eclipse, the Copilot CLI, the Copilot coding agent, the Copilot app, github.com and GitHub Mobile. GitHub says the rollout is gradual, so the model may not appear for everyone right away.

Two details matter most for paying teams. First, the model is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing, which means Copilot passes through the per-token rate the model maker charges. Anthropic's own Claude Code cost guide gives that API list price as $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. Second, on Business and Enterprise plans the model is on by default. It turns on automatically unless an administrator has turned off the global default for new models or disabled this model in the Copilot model policy. Organizations that want to review cost or policy before rollout have to act rather than wait. The changelog also notes that Opus 5.5 watermarks its text output, and GitHub says the watermark adds no tokens or cost and does not change meaning or readability.

The performance claim is narrower than it may sound. GitHub says that in early testing Opus 5.5 resolved tasks about as well as Claude Opus 5 while using significantly fewer steps and tokens, and recovered quickly from errors in multistep tasks. Neither the changelog nor the accompanying post names the tasks or gives numbers, so this is GitHub's report of its own testing, not a result readers can check or reproduce. Under usage-based billing, whether fewer tokens per task actually happens on a team's own work is the thing that would decide its bill.