Nightly digest ·
GitHub Copilot deprecates six models at once, and .NET 8 and .NET 9 get an end-of-support date (10 November 2026)
A quiet night, two entries. GitHub deprecated six models across most Copilot experiences as of 1 September 2026 — Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6, and Raptor Mini — each with a named replacement; a quiet swap for anyone who just picks a model from the menu, but a break for any workflow, script, or enterprise policy that named one by hand. And backfilling a major runtime milestone: Microsoft's support policy puts both .NET 8 (LTS) and .NET 9 (STS) at end of support on 10 November 2026 — after that neither gets security patches, and the upgrade target is .NET 10. On the board: Google Assistant's widely-reported mobile removal is now two days out with still no first-party dated page, and OpenSSL 3.0 reaches end-of-life on 7 September.
Two entries tonight — one from the monitored GitHub changelog feed, one backfilling a runtime end-of-support date every .NET shop needs on its calendar. No corrections outstanding; the three re-verification flags this evening were all Microsoft pages (Sentinel SAP, Azure Automation runtimes, Exchange Web Services) that render their dates in JavaScript — each re-confirmed correct by hand against Microsoft’s own APIs and page metadata.
New: GitHub Copilot deprecates six models at once — effective 1 September
GitHub has retired a batch of models you could pick inside Copilot. In an official changelog post (31 August), GitHub says that as of 1 September 2026 it has deprecated six models across most GitHub Copilot experiences — Copilot Chat, inline edits, ask and agent modes, and code completions:
| Deprecated model | Suggested replacement |
|---|---|
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | Gemini 3.7 Flash |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | Claude Opus 4.7, 4.8, or 5 |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | Claude Opus 4.7, 4.8, or 5 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| Raptor Mini | MAI-Code-1.1-Flash |
For most people this is a quiet swap: GitHub says no action is required — the deprecated options simply drop out of the model picker and the newer models take their place. One exception GitHub calls out: Claude Sonnet 4.6 stays available to individual Copilot subscribers on annual plans.
The people who need to act are the ones who wrote a model’s name down somewhere — a workflow, CI step, integration, or script that selects a Copilot model through the API, or an enterprise policy that allow-lists specific models. Those references stop resolving to a live model after 1 September, and GitHub’s guidance is to update them to a supported replacement. Copilot Enterprise administrators may additionally need to enable the alternative models through their Copilot model policies, then confirm each appears in the model selector in VS Code and on github.com. This is a model-lifecycle deprecation, not a service shutdown — nothing to export, no feature removed, only named models being swapped for their successors. It follows the earlier, separate deprecation of MAI-Code-1-Flash, which is still scheduled for 10 September.
New: .NET 8 and .NET 9 reach end of support — 10 November 2026
Backfilling a milestone that belongs on every .NET team’s calendar: Microsoft’s official .NET support policy lists both .NET 8 (LTS) and .NET 9 (STS) with an end-of-support date of 10 November 2026. They are different support tracks that happen to land on the same day. After that date, Microsoft stops shipping security patches, bug fixes, and support for both — apps keep running, but the next runtime CVE never gets fixed on 8.0 or 9.0.
The scope is large: anything with <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework> or net9.0, any container built FROM mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/aspnet:8.0 (or sdk/runtime, and the 9.0 tags), and any library still shipping those frameworks. The upgrade target is .NET 10, an LTS release supported through 14 November 2028. This entry is detectable — the lastcall CLI now reads .csproj target frameworks and the :8.0/:9.0 image tags (never the net10.0 successor), so a project still on 8.0/9.0 surfaces as a warning rather than a surprise in November.
On the board
- 4 September — two days out: we re-checked Google’s widely-reported removal of Google Assistant on mobile once more tonight. Still no first-party dated page — the working blog post says only “later this year” — so the entry stays without a countdown, per our no-inferred-dates rule. We’ll record the date the moment Google publishes it.
- 7 September — five days out: OpenSSL 3.0 reaches end-of-life.
Further out: the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation (10 September), the Relay app and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements (14 September), OpenAI’s Sora 2 video API (24 September), Cloudflare’s Registrar API (27 September), then a cluster on 30 September and 1 October, and further Cloudflare end-of-life dates through November and December. The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.