GitHub Copilot student plan removes premium models like Claude Opus and Sonnet

The student plan of GitHub Copilot has removed premium models. The company officially announced this recently, and students will lose manual selection for Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, and GPT 5.4.

The update keeps free Copilot access intact for verified students, and they’ve also created a new GitHub Copilot student plan. However, you won’t have access to these flagship models anymore. Users will now rely on auto mode for model selection. This announcement on the GitHub Community is the source for most of the information in this post.

Students quickly reacted on social media, with developers posting about the sudden change, right before a hackathon. The loss of Opus and Sonnet did students a lot. Many people echoed the disappointment, calling this move a downgrade for complex coding tasks. Coders on Reddit share similar views.

GitHub explained the reason for this, and it’s that premium models cost way too much to sustain two million students. Auto mode still pulls info from strong OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models, and that’s sufficient for students, according to them. The company also added an upgrade option, where students can switch to paid Pro or Pro+ plans. It’ll keep other student pack benefits active, and will give you access to the flagship models.

Developers are exploring alternatives, such as Zed student plans or free tiers of Cursor. For agent features, there’s also Google Antigravity.

People who use this for vibe code hackathons felt this the most. Complex debugging runs much slower, since there’s no premium access. Instead of removing the flagship models entirely, people are calling for rate limits instead.

GitHub actually invited feedback in the discussion, where students and educators can comment on their requested features and changes. They’re planning mode model tweaks based on user input. For now, unfortunately, advanced workflows will demand a paid upgrade, and students cannot enjoy flagship models anymore.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.