Microsoft has taken a meaningful step toward greater transparency in artificial intelligence by open-sourcing Copilot Chat—its popular conversational assistant built into Visual Studio Code, the world’s most widely used code editor.
The announcement, made on July 1, 2025, marks a significant move to involve the broader developer community. With the code now publicly available on GitHub under the MIT license, developers are free to explore, reuse, and contribute to the ongoing development of the tool.
What is Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code?
Copilot Chat is an AI-driven extension that lets developers interact with advanced language models—like GPT-4—right from within the Visual Studio Code environment. Through a conversational interface, users can ask questions about their code, troubleshoot bugs, or even generate new functions on the fly. The result? A smoother workflow and a noticeable boost in productivity.
The tool has been installed more than 35 million times According to data from Microsoft itself, which shows its impact.
What implies that it is open source?
Microsoft’s decision to open the source code of Copilot Chat goes far beyond a simple gesture of transparency. The GitHub repository provides in-depth insights into how the tool works behind the scenes, including:
- Agent Mode – the logic that decides how tasks are handled based on the user’s coding context.
- Context Sharing – details on what information is sent to the language models during interactions.
- System Prompts – the internal prompts that shape and guide the assistant’s behavior.
- Telemetry Mechanisms – how usage data is collected and analyzed.
According to the Visual Studio Code team, making this code public is a way to tap into the wider developer community’s collective expertise. The goal: to improve security, boost responsiveness, and spot issues faster. As the team put it in earlier updates, “The rise of open-source ecosystems—and the growing complexity of cyber threats—has made transparency a strategic advantage.”
The official GitHub repository is now live, complete with detailed documentation, usage examples, and a comprehensive FAQ section. Microsoft also plans to gradually integrate traditional Copilot features—which remain closed for now—into this extension. The aim is to consolidate development into a single, open-source project that serves as the foundation for its AI assistant tools.
What does it mean for the future?
Open-sourcing Copilot Chat marks more than just a technical release—it signals the start of a new chapter: one where developer-focused AI evolves hand-in-hand with the community. Cybersecurity expert and journalist Bill Toulas called it “a natural evolution in a landscape where trust and collaboration are essential.”
By making the tool’s inner workings transparent, Microsoft is inviting developers not just to use Copilot but to shape its future.
