At its annual Build 2025 conference in Seattle, Microsoft revealed plans to integrate Anthropic's AI coding agent into GitHub, further enhancing its developer tools ecosystem with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Microsoft Executive Vice President Jay Parikh made the announcement on Tuesday, just one day after the company introduced its own coding agent to GitHub. The Anthropic integration represents a significant expansion of Microsoft's AI coding offerings, which will also include a coding agent from OpenAI, underscoring Microsoft's evolving strategy toward a more neutral position in the competitive AI landscape.
The GitHub Copilot coding agent, currently powered by Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model, functions as an autonomous peer programmer that works directly within the GitHub platform. Unlike traditional coding assistants, this agent can be assigned tasks just like any human developer on a team. When assigned an issue in GitHub, the agent responds with an eyes emoji, works on the task, and then notifies the human developer once it has completed its work.
"The GitHub Copilot coding agent fits into our existing workflow and converts specifications to production code in minutes," said Alex Devkar, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Analytics at Carvana, who was quoted in GitHub's announcement.
The coding agent excels at handling low-to-medium complexity tasks in well-tested codebases, including adding features, fixing bugs, extending tests, refactoring code, and improving documentation. It operates within GitHub's native control layer and uses a secure, customizable development environment powered by GitHub Actions. As the agent works, it pushes commits to a draft pull request, allowing developers to track its progress through session logs.
This integration is part of Microsoft's broader vision for what it calls "agentic DevOps" - the next evolution of software development where intelligent agents collaborate with human developers across the entire software lifecycle. With over 15 million developers already using GitHub Copilot, Microsoft is positioning itself at the forefront of AI-assisted software development.