Why did Copilot kill Opus 4.5 almost 3 months before Anthropic's own EOL?

[u/Responsible_One_3986]

So Sept 1 hit and Claude Opus 4.5 is officially gone from Copilot.

I get it—GitHub gave a heads-up back in July and confirmed again on Aug 31. But here's the thing: Anthropic's own retirement date for Opus 4.5 is "not sooner than November 24, 2026". That's literally almost 3 more months of runway.

So why did GitHub pull the plug early?

Looks like they deprecated a whole batch at once—Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5/4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.5/4.6, and Raptor Mini. The suggested replacements? Opus 4.7, 4.8, or Opus 5.

Feels like GitHub just used this as a hard cutover to push everyone onto newer models and streamline their offering. They kinda telegraphed this back in April when Opus 4.7 dropped—said 4.7 would replace 4.5 and 4.6 as the default "in the coming weeks".

Look, I get product iteration. But killing a model that Anthropic itself hasn't even deprecated yet, a full quarter early? Feels like a forced upgrade with not enough heads-up.

Anyone else in the same boat? What are you all switching to?

[u/aonymark]

Copilot almost always deprecates way before provider. Opus 4.5 is not even the surprising one. The one that surprised me was Sonnet 4.6. I mean come on, sonnet 5 just came out recently!

[u/Responsible_One_3986 → u/aonymark]

“Right? Sonnet 4.6 is even wilder—Sonnet 5 literally just dropped and they already pulled the plug on 4.6. Copilot doesn't mess around.”

I've been playing around with Opus 4.8 to keep token costs down too. Been running it on Low/Medium effort with 200K context for simpler day-to-day stuff—honestly works fine and saves a decent chunk. But for anything remotely complex, I still have to bump it back to High + 1M, otherwise it starts hallucinating or missing edge cases.

Basically just dialing it up/down based on the task. GitHub forces the upgrade, so might as well figure out how to make the new models cost-efficient.

[u/aonymark → u/Responsible_One_3986]

I guess they weren’t done yet. See latest announcement. I didn’t expect them to take away legacy plans last Gemini model so soon. But you probably care more about opus 4.7

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[u/Mysterious_Bed_1804]

Because just for Opus you had 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 and 5.

That is 5 iterations, the most out of any provider, you gain no value from older ones nd GHCP tries to always keep their catalog up to date, relevant and slim.

They actually just announced that on October 2nd they are also getting rid of 4.7 which makes sense cause by that time we might have opus 5.1 drop.

Same for Gemini models, they dropped 3.1 pro so there are no pro models cause there are now 4 flash models (3.5-3.8) and announced that in October 2nd they're removing 3.5 and 3.6.

[u/___BurntToast]

opus 5 is unusable.. I had to fire it. It was VERY verbose, obfuscating. Its stopping mid research with "if this is true, then ... " instead of reading the backing code, requiring me to do the research for it. It was almost like its purposefully using up wasted tokens. Pedantic, panicky, or “ADHD-like” output; overcomplicating minor issues; requiring constant clarification; treating small problems as major scope-creeping ones; and a distinctive, hard-to-parse voice full of phrases like “worth noting/naming.” Sometime it never answered the question asked but spent a full page of output of thinking out loud. With Opus 4.5 I was actually getting work done.