The greyed-out model usually means that the model is not available for the current account, organization policy, client surface, or temporary service state. The fact that the Anthropic models still work in a cloud session does not prove that the same models are enabled for local VS Code chat.

I would check the following in order:

1. Confirm the license source. In VS Code, check whether Copilot is provided by your personal plan, an organization, or an enterprise. For Business and Enterprise users, model availability can be controlled at both organization and enterprise level. An organization setting may look enabled while an enterprise policy still restricts the model.

2. Check the model policy, not only the general Copilot policy. Ask an organization or enterprise owner to verify that the specific Claude models are available for the organization, and that no stricter policy applies to your seat. GitHub documents model availability and policy conflicts separately from the general Copilot feature settings.

3. Inspect the VS Code model picker. Open Chat, open the model picker, and select “Manage Language Models”. Check whether the model is disabled, unavailable for the current client, or waiting for administrator access. The “contact your admin” message is a strong indication that this is an entitlement or policy check rather than a prompt setting.

4. Update the client components. Update VS Code and the GitHub Copilot Chat extension, then run “Developer: Reload Window”. Sign out of GitHub in VS Code, sign in again, and confirm that the account shown in the Accounts menu is the account that owns the Copilot seat.

5. Compare the same account on GitHub.com. If the model is available on GitHub.com but greyed out in VS Code, the problem is probably client or surface specific. If it is unavailable everywhere, check the organization or enterprise model policy first.

6. Check the distinction between local and cloud sessions. “Local” here refers to the VS Code chat surface and its available model integrations. It does not necessarily mean that the model is running locally on your machine. A model can be available to a cloud agent or cloud session while being unavailable in the local IDE chat surface.

7. Collect diagnostics before reporting it. Record the exact model name, Copilot plan, organization or enterprise, VS Code version, Copilot extension version, timestamp, and the model picker state. Check the VS Code Output panel for GitHub Copilot errors. Do not include tokens or private repository data in the report.

The most useful next step is therefore to ask an organization or enterprise owner to verify the availability of each affected Claude model for the specific Copilot seat, then update VS Code and the Copilot extension. If the policy is correct and the model works in cloud chat but remains greyed out locally, report it as a client or service regression with the diagnostic details above.

References:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-on-github/set-up-copilot/configure-access-to-ai-models
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/policies
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/language-models

If this resolves the issue or the checklist helps identify the cause, please mark the answer as accepted.

This happens all the time with GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Even though your admin enabled Claude in the GitHub organization settings, VS Code's local token cache often gets stuck on the old permission state, which greys out the model in the chat panel.

First, try force-refreshing your local credentials. Sign out of Copilot directly in VS Code by opening the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P or Cmd+Shift+P on Mac), typing GitHub Copilot: Sign Out, and hitting enter. Then reload the window and sign back in. That forces VS Code to pull a fresh token with your updated org permissions.

It's also worth checking the model picker dropdown carefully. A known quirk in recent updates causes Claude to show up as disabled under an "Anthropic" vendor tab, while the usable version assigned by your organization actually sits under the main "Copilot" model list via the "Manage Models" option.

If those don't work, ask your GitHub admin to go into Organization Settings, flip the Claude policy switch off, save it, and flip it back on. Flipping that policy forces GitHub to push a global permission sync to all assigned seats, which almost always clears up the greyed-out status.