Best Large Language Models for GitHub Copilot

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. Apply our API to any language task — semantic search, summarization, sentiment analysis, content generation, translation, and more — with only a few examples or by specifying your task in English. One simple integration gives you access to our constantly-improving AI technology. Explore how you integrate with the API with these sample completions.

Claude Sonnet 3.7, developed by Anthropic, is a cutting-edge AI model that combines rapid response with deep reflective reasoning. This innovative model allows users to toggle between quick, efficient responses and more thoughtful, reflective answers, making it ideal for complex problem-solving. By allowing Claude to self-reflect before answering, it excels at tasks that require high-level reasoning and nuanced understanding. With its ability to engage in deeper thought processes, Claude Sonnet 3.7 enhances tasks such as coding, natural language processing, and critical thinking applications. Available across various platforms, it offers a powerful tool for professionals and organizations seeking a high-performance, adaptable AI.

GPT-4.1 is an advanced AI model from OpenAI, designed to enhance performance across key tasks such as coding, instruction following, and long-context comprehension. With a large context window of up to 1 million tokens, GPT-4.1 can process and understand extensive datasets, making it ideal for tasks like software development, document analysis, and AI agent workflows. Available through the API, GPT-4.1 offers significant improvements over previous models, excelling at real-world applications where efficiency and accuracy are crucial.

Claude Opus 4 represents a revolutionary leap in AI model performance, setting a new standard for coding and reasoning capabilities. As the world’s best coding model, Opus 4 excels in handling long-running, complex tasks, and agent workflows. With sustained performance that can run for hours, it outperforms all prior models—including the Sonnet series—making it ideal for demanding coding projects, research, and AI agent applications. It’s the model of choice for organizations looking to enhance their software engineering, streamline workflows, and improve productivity with remarkable precision. Now available on Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Opus 4 offers unparalleled support for coding, debugging, and collaborative agent tasks.

Gemini 3 Pro is Google’s most advanced multimodal AI model, built for developers who want to bring ideas to life with intelligence, precision, and creativity. It delivers breakthrough performance across reasoning, coding, and multimodal understanding—surpassing Gemini 2.5 Pro in both speed and capability. The model excels in agentic workflows, enabling autonomous coding, debugging, and refactoring across entire projects with long-context awareness. With superior performance in image, video, and spatial reasoning, Gemini 3 Pro powers next-generation applications in development, robotics, XR, and document intelligence. Developers can access it through the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, or Vertex AI, integrating seamlessly into existing tools and IDEs. Whether generating code, analyzing visuals, or building interactive apps from a single prompt, Gemini 3 Pro represents the future of intelligent, multimodal AI development.

Claude Sonnet 4, the latest evolution of Anthropic’s language models, offers a significant upgrade in coding, reasoning, and performance. Designed for diverse use cases, Sonnet 4 builds upon the success of its predecessor, Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering more precise responses and better task execution. With a state-of-the-art 72.7% performance on the SWE-bench, it stands out in agentic scenarios, offering enhanced steerability and clear reasoning capabilities. Whether handling software development, multi-feature app creation, or complex problem-solving, Claude Sonnet 4 ensures higher code quality, reduced errors, and a smoother development process.

GPT-5.1 Pro is the highest-performance version of the GPT-5.1 model family, designed for research-grade reasoning and advanced analytical workloads. It delivers deeper, more structured thinking, making it ideal for complex problem-solving across coding, science, finance, law, and technical research. Unlike the Instant and Thinking versions, GPT-5.1 Pro is built to maintain accuracy under heavy cognitive load, producing clearer logic and more reliable multi-step reasoning. Pro users also gain access to extended context windows, allowing significantly longer inputs and deeper information processing. While it supports the full range of ChatGPT features, GPT-5.1 Pro is optimized for precision, rigor, and high-stakes tasks. It is available exclusively to ChatGPT Pro and Business customers.

GPT-4.1 mini is a compact version of OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4.1 model, designed to provide high performance while significantly reducing latency and cost. With a smaller size and optimized architecture, GPT-4.1 mini still delivers impressive results in tasks such as coding, instruction following, and long-context processing. It supports up to 1 million tokens of context, making it an efficient solution for applications that require fast responses without sacrificing accuracy or depth.

GPT-4.1 nano is the smallest and most efficient version of OpenAI's GPT-4.1 model, optimized for low-latency, cost-effective AI processing. Despite its compact size, GPT-4.1 nano delivers strong performance with a 1 million token context window, making it ideal for applications like classification, autocompletion, and smaller-scale tasks that require fast responses. It provides a highly efficient solution for businesses and developers who need an AI model that balances speed, cost, and performance.

GPT-5 is OpenAI’s most advanced AI model, delivering smarter, faster, and more useful responses across a wide range of topics including math, science, finance, and law. It features built-in thinking capabilities that allow it to provide expert-level answers and perform complex reasoning. GPT-5 can handle long context lengths and generate detailed outputs, making it ideal for coding, research, and creative writing. The model includes a ‘verbosity’ parameter for customizable response length and improved personality control. It integrates with business tools like Google Drive and SharePoint to provide context-aware answers while respecting security permissions. Available to everyone, GPT-5 empowers users to collaborate with an AI assistant that feels like a knowledgeable colleague.

GPT-5.1 is the latest update in the GPT-5 series, designed to make ChatGPT dramatically smarter and more conversational. The release introduces two distinct model variants: GPT-5.1 Instant, which is described as the most-used model and is now warmer, better at following instructions, and more intelligent; and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which is the advanced reasoning engine that’s been tuned to be easier to understand, faster on straightforward tasks, and more persistent on complex ones. Users' queries are now routed automatically to the variant best-suited to the task. The update emphasizes not just improved raw intelligence but also enhanced communication style; the models are tuned to be more natural, enjoyable to talk to, and better aligned with user intents. The system card addendum notes that GPT-5.1 Instant uses “adaptive reasoning” that lets it decide when to think more deeply before responding, while GPT-5.1 Thinking adapts its thinking time accurately to the question at hand.

Claude Opus 4.1 is an incremental upgrade to Claude Opus 4 that boosts coding, agentic reasoning, and data-analysis performance without changing deployment complexity. It raises coding accuracy to 74.5 percent on SWE-bench Verified and sharpens in-depth research and detailed tracking for agentic search tasks. GitHub reports notable gains in multi-file code refactoring, while Rakuten Group highlights its precision in pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases without introducing bugs. Independent benchmarks show about a one-standard-deviation improvement on junior developer tests compared to Opus 4, mirroring major leaps seen in prior Claude releases. Opus 4.1 is available now to paid Claude users, in Claude Code, and via the Anthropic API (model ID claude-opus-4-1-20250805), as well as through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows with no additional setup beyond selecting the new model.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s latest frontier model, designed to excel in long-horizon coding, agentic workflows, and intensive computer use while maintaining safety and alignment. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark (for software engineering) and leads on OSWorld (a computer use benchmark), with the ability to sustain focus over 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks. The model introduces improvements in tool handling, memory management, and context processing, enabling more sophisticated reasoning, better domain understanding (from finance and law to STEM), and deeper code comprehension. It supports context editing and memory tools to sustain long conversations or multi-agent tasks, and allows code execution and file creation within Claude apps. Sonnet 4.5 is deployed at AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3), with classifiers protecting against inputs or outputs tied to risky domains, and includes mitigations against prompt injection.

GPT-5.1 Instant is a high-performance AI model designed for everyday users that combines speed, responsiveness, and improved conversational warmth. The model uses adaptive reasoning to instantly select how much computation is required for a task, allowing it to deliver fast answers without sacrificing understanding. It emphasizes stronger instruction-following, enabling users to give precise directions and expect consistent compliance. The model also introduces richer personality controls so chat tone can be set to Default, Friendly, Professional, Candid, Quirky, or Efficient, with experiments in deeper voice modulation. Its core value is to make interactions feel more natural and less robotic while preserving high intelligence across writing, coding, analysis, and reasoning. GPT-5.1 Instant routes user requests automatically from the base interface, with the system choosing whether this variant or the deeper “Thinking” model is applied.

GPT-5.1 Thinking is the advanced reasoning model variant in the GPT-5.1 series, designed to more precisely allocate “thinking time” based on prompt complexity, responding faster to simpler requests and spending more effort on difficult problems. On a representative task distribution, it is roughly twice as fast on the fastest tasks and twice as slow on the slowest compared with its predecessor. Its responses are crafted to be clearer, with less jargon and fewer undefined terms, making deep analytical work more accessible and understandable. The model dynamically adjusts its reasoning depth, achieving a better balance between speed and thoroughness, particularly when dealing with technical concepts or multi-step questions. By combining high reasoning capacity with improved clarity, GPT-5.1 Thinking offers a powerful tool for tackling complex tasks, such as detailed analysis, coding, research, or technical explanations, while reducing unnecessary latency for routine queries.

Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s newest flagship model, delivering major improvements in reasoning, coding, agentic workflows, and real-world problem solving. It outperforms previous models and leading competitors on benchmarks such as SWE-bench, multilingual coding tests, and advanced agent evaluations. Opus 4.5 also introduces stronger safety features, including significantly higher resistance to prompt injection and improved alignment across sensitive tasks. Developers gain new controls through the Claude API—like effort parameters, context compaction, and advanced tool use—allowing for more efficient, longer-running agentic workflows. Product updates across Claude, Claude Code, the Chrome extension, and Excel integrations expand how users interact with the model for software engineering, research, and everyday productivity. Overall, Claude Opus 4.5 marks a substantial step forward in capability, reliability, and usability for developers, enterprises, and end users.