A few days ago, OpenAI announced GPT-5, its most advanced reasoning model to date with upgrades to coding capabilities, math, reasoning, and more. Shortly after, Microsoft announced that it is integrating the latest model into its products, which is natural considering the partnership between the two firms. Now, Microsoft has revealed that it has begun rolling out GPT-5 integration in Visual Studio through GitHub Copilot.
Microsoft says that the introduction of GPT-5 in development workflows should expedite the processes starting from ideation and going up to productionization of solutions. The company has touted various benefits, including "substantial" improvements in reasoning and decision-making while handling complex tasks, better code quality and maintainability with minimal prompting, agentic tuning, and clarity in explanations when discussing code changes. Microsoft believes that GPT-5 will make you "move faster" while still staying in control.
Although Microsoft and OpenAI think that GPT-5 will revolutionize how AI models shape our lives for the better, reception to the latest model has been lukewarm so far. There was backlash regarding chat limits in ChatGPT following the rollout of GPT-5, which then prompted OpenAI to fine-tune its rate limits in response to feedback. Social media is also rife with examples and jokes about how GPT-5 is actually worse than older models in many ways:
GPT-5 just refactored my entire codebase in one call.
— vas (@vasumanmoza) August 7, 2025
25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.
It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.
None of it worked.
But boy was it beautiful. pic.twitter.com/RCTGK1DE9H
GPT-5 has begun rolling out to Visual Studio customers leveraging paid GitHub Copilot plans starting today. However, since this is a staggered rollout, it may not become available to you immediately. You can check if you have it by clicking the Copilot badge in Visual Studio, opening chat, and then selecting GPT-5 (Preview). You can access it in both Agent Mode and Ask Mode. Enterprise customers should ask their admins to enable the GPT-5 policy in their Copilot settings, which will enable tenants to select the latest model from the model picker in Visual Studio. In a similar vein, also keep in mind that certain older models like o3-mini will soon be deprecated in GitHub Copilot.