(Jonathan Raa/Getty Images)

Git gud

GitHub may have fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history

Rivals like Cursor and Claude Code are eroding GitHub’s Copilot user base, and Microsoft execs are sounding the alarm about the platform itself.

Claire Yubin Oh

5/20/26 10:57AM

GitHub’s biggest source of growth? AI is attracting thousands of developers to its platform. GitHub’s biggest problem? AI is attracting thousands of developers to its platform.

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The world’s largest code repository platform, GitHub, has been central to the world’s largest software company ever since Microsoft acquired the platform in 2018. But it’s at something of an AI crossroads: AI has led to a coding boom, and therefore more usage of GitHub, but it’s also led to a crop of new coding tools, pressuring GitHub’s AI-powered coding feature, Copilot (not to be confused with the dozens of other Microsoft Copilot products).

Pioneering the world of AI coding in 2021, GitHub Copilot built on its first-mover advantage in its early years, bundling the then autocompleting tool in its main cloud suite. But as more powerful followers arrived, like Cursor in 2024 and Anthropic’s Claude Code in mid-2025, GitHub Copilot’s growth streak has been looking a paler green than its competitors. X users haven’t been kind about the chain of events.

> be github
> invent copilot
> you are literally the first one
> you are literally the only one
> you literally have access to all the code in the world
> get mogged by literally every single agentic bs that came out in the past few years

this level of fumble should be studied
— kitze (@thekitze) May 14, 2026

But perhaps most worrying is that, per The Information, even Jay Parikh, who oversees the division that controls GitHub in Microsoft, has warned that the unit faces a critical threat: if GitHub does not adapt, rivals could replace not only Copilot but also the platform itself.

Web traffic data provided by Similarweb to Sherwood News reveals just how quickly Cursor has overtaken GitHub’s Copilot. (Note: as these coding tools tend to be plugged in within developers’ coding ecosystems, this website traffic data better represents interest from new and potential users than existing developers’ usage.)

GitHub Copilot lost its lead — Sherwood News

GitHub as a platform, on the other hand, saw nearly one-fifth of its entire projects created in 2025 alone as users increasingly used the mostly free service as a pipeline to develop projects amid an AI-powered usage boost. But in turn, gross margins in the company’s gargantuan Intelligent Cloud business took a hit from “increased GitHub Copilot usage” in the most recent earnings — and the unit recently posted an apology letter over its repeated outages (with the words “we are sorry”).

Adding to the platform’s troubles, yesterday it announced that hackers breached almost 4,000 of GitHub’s own internal code repositories, after an employee installed a malicious extension.

The tech giant may try to kill the threat from within, as the company considers making its own engineers switch from Claude Code to GitHub Copilot. The company has also announced a transition to a usage-based business model, presumably in a bid to protect the company’s margins from power users sucking up all of the compute. It might successfully do that, but it won’t reverse time to an era before the 3 C’s — Claude, Cursor, and Codex — existed, threatening GitHub’s place in the coding universe.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5