Copilot Fusion GA: Near Claude Code Quality at Half the Cost

Copilot Fusion became generally available on October 28, 2026 at GitHub Universe. It is the production release of Project HydraFusion, introduced as a research preview on September 4, 2026. Rather than selecting a specific model, developers pick an effort level (Standard, High, or Max) and Fusion routes prompts internally across multiple models. On Artificial Analysis's Coding Agent Index, Fusion Max scored 60 compared to Claude Code with Opus 5.5's 61.7, at $5.59 per task versus $11.42. GitHub is offering a limited-time 30% discount on model costs for paid Copilot plan users. Fusion is available on VS Code, the GitHub Copilot app, Copilot CLI, and JetBrains IDEs. GitHub Universe also unveiled Foundry, a managed service for building long-running agents, and Copilot Projects, an orchestration loop for working with multiple agents across repositories. The Octoverse 2026 report documented that merged pull requests tripled to 220 million per month and commits more than tripled to 7.38 billion per month, with growth attributed largely to agentic engineering. New repository creation doubled to 30.3 million per month. Infrastructure strain became visible on August 17, when a traffic surge 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 during 2026, and is migrating to a multi-region Azure deployment expected to complete early next year.