October 2 is the Copilot deprecation line, not the new model

So GitHub Copilot Updates put Upcoming deprecation of selected GitHub Copilot models on the feed on September 3. Same row lands on github-changelog. We did not mark it Important. The hard date still is. October 2, 2026.

Recency wants the shiny sibling. Gemini 3.8 Flash is now available. Fine. That is the model name people screenshot into Slack. The partner-break line is the table underneath. Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.6 Flash go away. Kimi K2.7 Code goes away. Claude Opus 4.7 goes away. Suggested alternatives are Gemini 3.8 Flash, Kimi K3, and Claude Opus 5. Across Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions.

I keep almost filing this under "new model shipped." Kind of the wrong habit. Availability is what your AE forwards. Deprecation with a calendar day is what breaks a workflow that still pins Opus 4.7 or an older Flash in agent mode.

To the best of my understanding the quiet half is admin policy. Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Business admins may need to enable the alternatives in model settings before users even see them in the selector. No action is required to remove the old models after October 2. That sentence sounds calm. Same energy as Heroku's most users need no action. The work is before the date, not after.

We already wrote about Important catching Shopify deprecations and Heroku rebuild cohorts. This one slipped the Important flag and still has a sunset you can put on a calendar. If you sell next to Copilot, or your customer pins models in agent workflows, let's say, October 2 is the talking point. Not "GitHub added Gemini 3.8 Flash."

We pull both rows into the same JSON shape at /sources/github-copilot-updates. Title, date, URL. The talking point is the deprecation date. The new model name is the decoy.