MiniMax M2.5 is now available in GitHub Copilot for free and student use

GitHub Copilot now lets Free users and students use MiniMax M2.5, but no official clients—Copilot CLI, VS Code, github.com/copilot UI, or OpenCode—display it.  However, it's in the model listing API 3 times and and usable via GitHub OAuth.

The model listing API provides a lot of detail about it.  It indicates that M2.5 is being served by Fireworks, and that there's a "(Fast)" version served by Cerebras.   Both are only available to "free" and "edu" subscriptions, to compensate, one would think, for the removal of premium models from the student plan (https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/189268).) Both are marked as preview, "model_picker_enabled=false" and "model_picker_category=powerful".  The ID of "MiniMax M2.5 (Fast)" is minimax-m2p5-cb instead of minimax-m2p5-fw.

{
  "billing": {
    "is_premium": true,
    "multiplier": 1,
    "restricted_to": ["free", "edu"]
  },
  "capabilities": {
    "family": "minimax-m2p5-fw",
    "limits": {"max_context_window_tokens": 196608, "max_output_tokens": 32000, "max_prompt_tokens": 164000},
    "object": "model_capabilities",
    "supports": {
      "parallel_tool_calls": true,
      "reasoning_effort": ["low", "medium", "high"],
      "streaming": true,
      "structured_outputs": true,
      "tool_calls": true
    },
    "tokenizer": "o200k_base",
    "type": "chat"
  },
  "id": "accounts/msft/routers/mp3yn0h7",
  "is_chat_default": false,
  "is_chat_fallback": false,
  "model_picker_category": "powerful",
  "model_picker_enabled": false,
  "name": "MiniMax M2.5 (Copilot)",
  "object": "model",
  "policy": {"state": "enabled", "terms": ""},
  "preview": true,
  "supported_endpoints": ["/chat/completions"],
  "vendor": "Fireworks",
  "version": "accounts/msft/routers/mp3yn0h7"
}

The reason the official clients don't show the MiniMax models is because the model_picker_enabled field on them is set to false.  In Piebald we weren't aware of that field, and therefore by accident we don't respect it, thus revealing these options.  They must be pretty new because we have plenty of Copilot users and none of have used MiniMax with Copilot before.