GitHub Copilot Fusion became generally available on October 28, 2026 at GitHub Universe. The system routes prompts across Claude and GPT models automatically, with developers selecting an effort level (Standard, High, or Max) rather than a specific model, described as "model orchestration over model selection." On Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index, Fusion Max scored 60 against Claude Code with Opus 5.5's 61.7, at $5.59 per task versus $11.42. Fusion consumed approximately 7.2 million tokens per task, about half of Claude Code's usage. In offline evaluations, fixed HydraFusion policies "improved verified task quality by 4.9 percentage points at 67% lower estimated cost than Claude Opus 5 on TerminalBench 2.1." Fusion is the production release of Project HydraFusion, which debuted as a research preview on September 4, 2026. Paid Copilot plan users receive a limited-time 30% discount on model costs. The product is available across VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, Copilot CLI, and JetBrains IDEs.
Universe also introduced Foundry, a managed service for building long-running agents that can reason, use tools, and complete tasks, and Copilot Projects, which provides an orchestration loop across multiple agents and repositories. A new Copilot app and a deeper code review tier were announced alongside those.
The Octoverse 2026 report, released at Universe, showed that merged pull requests tripled to 220 million per month and commits more than tripled to 7.38 billion per month, with most of that increase in the second half of 2026. New repository creation doubled to 30.3 million per month. The report attributed that growth largely to agentic engineering. Methodology included LLM classification to adjust for VPN usage bias in country-level push statistics and a fine-tuned multilingual embedding model to classify repositories into NAICS sectors.
That volume growth had infrastructure consequences: a traffic surge on August 17 knocked out authentication, Actions, pull requests, and Copilot for 7 hours and 47 minutes. In response, GitHub added 4 million CPU cores, 160 petabytes of high-speed storage, and 50 Tb/s of network capacity in 2026, and is migrating to a multi-region Azure deployment expected to complete early next year. GitHub is also rebuilding Git to decouple storage from compute.