GitHub Models is now retired

GitHub Models is retired as of July 30, 2026, according to the GitHub Changelog and The GitHub Blog. The retirement applies to every customer. The playground, model catalog, inference API, and bring your own key (BYOK) path are no longer available.

Those four surfaces covered the full product loop. The playground was interactive try-and-eval. The model catalog was discovery and selection. The inference API was programmatic calling. BYOK let teams route through their own provider keys instead of a fully hosted path. All of that is shut off together, so there is no residual catalog, no residual playground, and no residual inference endpoint under the GitHub Models product.

For engineers and builders, any workflow that depended on GitHub Models for trial, catalog lookup, or API inference is broken as of that date. Prototypes, scripts, CI steps, internal demos, and docs that pointed at those surfaces need a different host. BYOK users lose the GitHub-side integration even if they still hold keys with an external provider; the keys remain with the provider, but the GitHub Models bridge is gone.

In market terms, GitHub is exiting the Models product line rather than narrowing it. Competitors and other platforms still offer playgrounds, catalogs, and inference APIs outside GitHub. Teams that standardized on GitHub Models for a single place to discover and call models must re-split that stack across another vendor or their own infra.

Practical next steps: remove GitHub Models URLs and SDKs from code and docs, confirm no jobs still hit the retired inference API, and move playground and catalog work to whatever provider you already use for production models. Watch for any follow-on GitHub guidance on migration or replacement surfaces; until that exists, treat the product as fully unavailable.