The popular artificial intelligence tool GitHub Copilot, which helps developers write code in Microsoft Visual Studio by automatically completing it, stopped working for users from Ukraine. This is reported by numerous Ukrainian developers who faced the fact that all their Copilot plugins have lost contact with the GitHub server. Moreover, access via VPN works, so we are talking about certain regional restrictions. It seems that GitHub has blocked Ukrainian IP addresses for Copilot.

Microsoft, which owns the popular GitHub repository and developed the Copilot tool in partnership with OpenAI, has yet to respond to the problem. However, it is worth taking into consideration that OpenAI itself since last year blocks access to its API GPT-3 for Ukrainians, on the basis of which the popular ChatGPT chatbot works. Unfortunately, the company put Ukraine on the same sanctions list with such authoritarian countries as China, Iran and russia.

It seems that the hope that investment in OpenAI on the part of the Microsoft corporation, which is present in the Ukrainian market and better understands all the nuances of its work, did not justify itself, and Ukrainians will not get access not only to to ChatGPT, but also to other OpenAI developments. However, we hope that publicity will help to solve this problem. Perhaps the Ministry of Digital Transformation should now contact Microsoft directly, because the department’s previous appeal to OpenAI did not yield any results.