GitHub Copilot content exclusions are generally available in its app and CLI

GitHub announced on 2 September 2026 that content exclusion policies for GitHub Copilot are generally available in the Copilot app and the Copilot CLI. The feature had been in a limited release before this. It is included with Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise.

What the feature does

Content exclusions let an administrator name files that Copilot must not read as context when it generates a suggestion or acts on an agentic workflow. GitHub's wording is direct: "Copilot won't use excluded files as context, helping you protect sensitive code across agentic workflows."

The policy can be set at three levels: the enterprise, the organization, or an individual repository. That layering matters, because a company-wide rule about credentials, keys, vendor code with licence restrictions, or a specific customer's data can be written once at the enterprise level and applied at every level below.

What is covered and what is not

The changelog names two Copilot products: the Copilot app and the Copilot CLI. It does not extend general availability to the IDE integrations in the same post, so teams using the VS Code, Visual Studio, or JetBrains extensions should check their own settings before assuming the same exclusions apply there.

Only the Business and Enterprise plans get this. Personal Copilot subscriptions are outside the scope of the announcement.

Most engineering teams that pay for Copilot have already had a version of this conversation: which files should never end up as prompt context, and how do we enforce that when the model reads whatever the developer's editor happens to have open. The honest answer, until now, was a written policy and trust that people followed it. Content exclusions turn that into a setting.

The immediate action for an administrator is small: open the enterprise or organization Copilot settings, add glob patterns for the paths that were previously handled by convention, and confirm that the excluded files no longer appear as context in a test suggestion from the Copilot app and the CLI. Repository administrators can add project-specific rules on top of that.

The next action is a review of where else Copilot runs inside the company. The changelog is specific about the app and the CLI. If the team relies on Copilot Chat inside VS Code, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio, the exclusion behaviour there is a separate configuration, and worth verifying before writing a policy that assumes coverage.

There is also a plain licensing consequence. A team on individual Copilot subscriptions that has been avoiding certain files by asking developers to close them cannot use this feature without moving those seats onto Business or Enterprise. That is a real cost, and it is the price of having the rule enforced.

Source

Primary source: Content exclusions generally available in Copilot app and CLI.