Reference · GitHub · updated 27 September 2026
First-party, so it gets the identity plane everyone else has to fake. Here is what its public documentation says about authentication, commit attribution, the sandbox it runs in, how you hand it work, and the limits you will hit.
| Auth | Runs under GitHub's own Copilot identity. It can push only to a copilot/ branch or to the PR branch it was mentioned on, never to the default branch. |
| Attribution | Commits are authored by Copilot with the human who started the task as co-author, and are signed ("Verified"). Since March 2026 every commit carries an Agent-Logs-Url trailer linking to the session log. Users have asked, so far without success, to be the commit author themselves. |
| Sandbox | An ephemeral environment on GitHub Actions with an egress firewall on by default, a 59-minute hard cap, and one repository per run. Workflows triggered by its PRs need approval from someone with write access. |
| Task intake | Assign an issue to Copilot, mention @copilot on a PR, the Agents panel, VS Code, Slack and Teams, the create_pull_request_with_copilot MCP tool, or scheduled automations. Each session costs one premium request. |
| Limits | Not available on GitHub Enterprise Server. Agentic usage bills against premium requests (AI Credits since June 2026) plus Actions minutes. GitHub has said agentic load forced a 30x capacity redesign in 2026. |
Every cloud agent in this series invents its own identity and attribution model, because the host gives them nothing to stand on. The consequences are the same across vendors: agents share a person's token or an org-wide app installation, so a fleet hits secondary rate limits as one user; attribution lives in free-text trailers the host never reads; and rules like "a human must approve changes under this path" are left to the agent to enforce on itself.
Paste this to your coding agent. A human approves one code on github.com; the agent does the rest.
Set up githug for owner/repo: run `curl -fsSL https://githug.ai/install | sh`, then `hug init --repo owner/repo --json`. Show me any code or link it prints and wait for it to finish.
Quickstart · Set it up yourself · free during the beta