Visual Studio 2026 lets teams point Copilot at their own model contract, not just GitHub's
The September update adds Bring Your Own Key support for Microsoft Foundry, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Ollama deployments, plus a new Git-reading agent -- a direct fix for the spend-attribution problem of being locked to GitHub-metered usage.
Visual Studio 2026 version 18.10.0 shipped September 8, 2026 with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support, letting teams route Copilot-in-VS traffic through Microsoft Foundry, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Ollama deployments instead of only GitHub-hosted models. The release also adds an "Agent (Preview)" built on the GitHub Copilot SDK, and a Git agent that can be handed a pull request and answer questions about it inline.
Why BYOK is the practical fix, not just a feature
Microsoft's own framing: the update lets teams "use AI in Visual Studio with the models your team prefers." That's a direct answer to the exact cost-attribution problem this site tracks -- an organization that already has a negotiated contract or cost center with a specific model provider no longer has to accept GitHub-metered usage as the only option inside the IDE, and can instead route spend through whichever billing relationship it already manages.
A Git agent built for reviewers, not just authors
The new Git agent -- built on the same Copilot SDK-powered harness as the broader Agent (Preview) -- is scoped narrowly: read a PR, answer questions about it, without needing to open a separate chat and paste in context. It's a smaller change than BYOK, but it's aimed squarely at the reviewer side of the workflow, which most coding-agent releases so far have mostly ignored in favor of the author side.