Organization runner controls for Copilot cloud agent

Each time Copilot cloud agent works on a task, it starts a new development environment powered by GitHub Actions.

By default, this runs on a standard GitHub-hosted runner, but teams can also customize the agent environment to use large runners or self-hosted runners for faster performance, access to internal resources, and more.

Until now, the runner was configured at the repository level with a copilot-setup-steps.yml file. This made it difficult to roll out consistent defaults or enforce guardrails across an organization.

Organization admins can now:

• Set a default runner to be used automatically across all repositories, without requiring each repository to be individually configured.
• Lock the runner setting so individual repositories can’t override the organization default.

This means you can set sensible defaults for your teams (e.g., using larger GitHub Actions runners for better performance) and optionally ensure that the agent always runs where you want it to, such as on your self-hosted runners.

To learn more, see “Configuring runners for GitHub Copilot cloud agent in your organization” in the GitHub Docs.