Claude Sonnet was the best coding model students had free access to. GitHub removed it quietly on March 12, 2026. Nearly two million students lost it overnight. Add your voice to the community.
The new "GitHub Copilot Student" plan silently removes self-selection of Anthropic's Claude models — the same models that led the industry on coding tasks. You are now routed through "Auto mode" with no control over which model handles your request.
“Why all this corporate nonsense text? Just say you want to cut costs and remove the expensive models.”
“Not even Sonnet? I get Opus, but we can’t even get Sonnet?”
“I’d rather have a discount and still have access to models rather than free but useless.”
“Premium models consume more requests anyway — it is an idiotic decision. They aren’t saving inference costs; they’re just moving from some large-model requests to many small-model requests.”
“I had just begun using Copilot directly from GitHub’s UI this week. I thought it was great and even outperformed raw Claude Code on my terminal. Reducing model intelligence will make the harness irrelevant.”
“Copilot just got useless, basically.”
A place for affected students to share how they used Claude Sonnet and what losing it means for their work. Fill in the form — your response shows up in the community.
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