Provenance Record

Clean, well-structured News piece: an Overview lead followed by two clearly separated policy threads (model deprecations; Business/Enterprise sign-up reopening + billing change), plus an honest 'What We Don't Know' section that explicitly declines to speculate on the two other Sept 28 policy changes mentioned in source-1 (unified Copilot Chat experience, code-review effort-level default). 580 words, within the News category range (400-1200).

All 3 sources fetched successfully (status 200, no suspicious_patterns) and all 3 sha256 hashes verified by decompressing and rehashing the .html.gz snapshots — matched the manifest exactly. Read every snapshot in full: (1) source-0.html.gz (github.blog/changelog/2026-07-31-upcoming-august-2026-model-deprecations-in-github-copilot) — confirms the six deprecated models (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Raptor Mini), their Sept 1 2026 deprecation date, and each suggested alternative exactly as listed in the article's table description; confirms both direct quotes ('will remain available to individual GitHub Copilot subscribers on annual plans so they retain a Sonnet offering', 'the deprecation of Claude Sonnet 4.6 does not apply to these customers', 'may need to enable access to the alternative model through their model policies in Copilot settings') verbatim. Does NOT support the article's added descriptor 'Microsoft's in-house small coding model' for Raptor Mini — flagged as a finding above. (2) source-1.html.gz (github.blog/changelog/2026-08-28-upcoming-changes-to-github-copilot-policies-and-billing) — confirms the Sept 1 2026 sign-up reopening for credit-card/PayPal Business and Enterprise customers, the per-seat upfront-payment requirement, and the Oct 1 2026 extension to existing customers, all verbatim-matched against the article's direct quotes. Also confirms the two other policy changes (unified Copilot Chat experience, code-review effort-level default, both effective no earlier than Sept 28) that the article correctly declines to detail in 'What We Don't Know'. (3) source-2.html.gz (github.blog/changelog/2026-04-22-pausing-new-self-serve-signups-for-github-copilot-business) — confirms the April 22 pause applied only to Free/Team-plan organizations and that existing Business customers were unaffected, matching the article's paraphrase. All 3 external URLs cited in article.sources also appear as in-body Markdown links (no orphan-source gap). The one internal link (/article/2026-04/29-...) was spot-checked against the existing published article and its claims (Pro/Pro+/Student pause, June 1 AI Credits shift) check out.

All direct quotes are verbatim from their cited sources. All specifics in the model-deprecation table (model names, dates, alternatives) trace exactly to source-0's table. One unsourced specific found: the parenthetical description of Raptor Mini as 'Microsoft's in-house small coding model' has no support in any of the 3 cited sources or in the article archive. This is a single, subordinate, non-headline/summary/lead specific — recoverable via a corrections note per the APPROVE_WITH_CORRECTIONS criteria.

Substantively strong, well-sourced News piece with verbatim-accurate quotes and correct handling of what GitHub has and hasn't disclosed. One unsourced descriptive specific (Raptor Mini's Microsoft attribution) is being corrected via a public corrections record. APPROVE_WITH_CORRECTIONS.