VSCodium 1.140.06880 strips AI SDKs from the telemetry-free VS Code
The community build of Visual Studio Code just deleted GitHub Copilot's, Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, and OpenAI's Codex from its source tree. It isn't dialing them back. It's taking them out entirely.
VSCodium 1.140.06880 has been released. Most of the release notes read like routine build housekeeping. The commit that actually carries the story sits near the top: fix: remove ai sdks, by @daiyam.
For anyone watching this project, that one line is the whole story.
The change removes three AI SDKs from the build altogether, taking them out of package.json, the lockfiles, the source files, and even the native platform binaries plus their unit tests. The working branch was even named fix-copilot, which tells you the maintainer treated this as a single bug to fix rather than a feature rollout.
It tracks VS Code 1.140.0, Microsoft's milestone from 30 September. Microsoft is pushing the editor further into agents and multi-model orchestration than ever before. @daiyam is doing the opposite.
You may have seen VSCodium described as a fork of VS Code. It isn't, technically. It's a build pipeline. Open scripts clone Microsoft's public vscode repository, apply patches, run Microsoft's own build commands, and upload the binaries to GitHub releases under the MIT license.
Microsoft does the very same steps, just in reverse. It clones the same repo, drops in a customized product.json, and ships a build under its own proprietary license. VSCodium performs the identical dance but deletes the proprietary layers instead of bolting them on.
That difference is the whole point. Official VS Code runs telemetry by default and can't be fully disabled even through settings. VSCodium turns telemetry off at the build level. Official VS Code shows you the Microsoft logo and points you at the Marketplace. VSCodium drops the branding and defaults to the open-source Open VSX registry instead.
Keep in mind that Microsoft's Marketplace Terms of Use forbid installing Marketplace extensions on third-party builds. Open VSX exists precisely because of that restriction. It covers most popular extensions, but a few proprietary ones — including some Microsoft-published ones — simply aren't available.
The AI removal, and the trade-off
VS Code 1.140 leans on a modular agent architecture that can drive multiple AI providers at once. To make that work, Microsoft pulls in third-party SDKs as dependencies. VSCodium removes all three of them.
The practical effect matters more than the symbolism. VSCodium never shipped Copilot by default, but prior builds still contained the SDK code and could reference it. This release removes the plumbing entirely, producing a build that is structurally incapable of auto-provisioning Copilot, Claude, or Codex out of the box.
You still get VS Code 1.140's own features, since VSCodium rebuilds Microsoft's source. That includes a Copilot-powered agent host, experimental multi-folder sessions, remote delegation, and HydraFusion, a preview that lets models draft, critique, and revise code automatically. Here's the catch. Several of those agent features are exactly what VSCodium's own patches dial back, since the SDKs they rely on have just been excised.
It's a bit of an irony worth sitting with. Microsoft recently made its VS Code release notes Copilot-generated, with weekly Stable releases now partly powered by AI-written changelogs. And the most prominent community clone is quietly pulling those same AI toolchains out at the source level, one commit at a time.
That's not to say the move is free of cost. Removing SDKs is cheap in the privacy sense but costs you agent functionality. If you actually want Copilot or Codex, you can still get them — just install them manually through Open VSX, or re-add the SDKs yourself.
Where it runs and where to grab it
1.140.06880 is one of the more broadly packaged editor releases around. You can pull it for x86-64, arm64, armhf, ppc64le, riscv64, loong64, and s390x, across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Formats include .msi, .dmg, .deb, .rpm, .tar.gz, AppImage, Snap, and Flatpak, plus Remote Host, Web Host, and standalone CLI builds.
That breadth is why VSCodium shows up in enterprise and air-gapped environments, and it's the reason this cycle's hardening of the PPC64LE and RISC-V builds earns a little attention.
The build pipeline itself is fully public. Scripts like check_tags.sh, prepare_assets.sh, and release.sh all live on GitHub, so anyone can reproduce the binaries. PrivacyTools.io still ranks VSCodium as the number one privacy-friendly editor, citing exactly that reproducibility plus telemetry that's "gone at the build level rather than hidden behind a setting you have to trust." Binaries are MIT-licensed, pull no usage data, and carry your existing VS Code settings and keybindings over unchanged.
Head here to download 1.140.06880 from the official GitHub releases page.
