Positron and RStudio IDE AI and machine learning News and product releases

Posit AI is Now Available to All

portrait of Nick Rohrbaugh
Written by Nick Rohrbaugh
Written by Alex Chisholm
Written by Tom Mock
2026-05-05
Posit AI logo

Posit Assistant and Next Edit Suggestions (NES) enter public preview today, bringing powerful new AI capabilities directly to all RStudio users. These features can be powered by Posit AI, a subscription service that also enters general availability today and includes a free trial with no credit card required. Finally, we’re excited to release Posit Workbench and RStudio 2026.04.0 (Globemaster Allium), which introduce the Posit Assistant preview to RStudio Pro and Positron Pro sessions.

Building an AI assistant for data science

To share how we built an AI assistant tuned specifically for the complex reality of data science, we put together a short video highlighting the engineering choices behind Posit Assistant. Watch to learn more about Posit Assistant’s features like predictive modeling, thinking, and a brand new Terminal User Interface.

Posit Assistant

Posit Assistant is an agent purpose-built for data science, running inside the RStudio sidebar on frontier models from Anthropic. What makes it different from a general-purpose coding agent is its harness — the machinery that routes each task to the right combination of tools, skills, and reasoning before the model starts responding. 

Exploring a new dataset might generate ggplot2 code and render a plot in the Plots pane. When fitting a model, Posit Assistant’s predictive modeling skill uses tidymodels, splitting data and holding out the test set. Debugging works backwards from the exact error in your console, not from a secondhand description of what went wrong.

Predictive Modeling Skill

Posit Assistant’s harness is extensible. Teams can wire in their own Skills and MCP servers, so the patterns your team already relies on become patterns it follows.

A lightbulb icon in the Assistant panel toggles reasoning, where the model thinks through a problem before it acts and shows its thinking to you. Plan mode gives you a way to inspect and modify or approve its strategy before any changes land. A granular permissions system controls what the assistant can read, edit, or run. And for people who prefer the terminal, we’re working on a Terminal User Interface (TUI) that can render full-color inline plots right in the shell. 

Posit Assistant TUI

Everything Posit Assistant does is visible as code you can read, edit, and rerun.

Next Edit Suggestions (NES)

Next Edit Suggestions (NES for short) offers context-aware completions as you type. Because it sees the same live session Posit Assistant does, its suggestions reflect the columns in your loaded data frames, the helpers you defined ten minutes ago, and the packages you imported. Every Posit AI subscription includes unlimited NES usage.

Privacy

Your privacy matters to us. Posit AI is backed by a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreement with Anthropic, our model provider. When you send a prompt or code snippet through Posit AI, it is used exclusively to generate a response and is then immediately deleted. Your data is never used to train future models. By default, you’re opted out of sharing trace data with Posit to improve the Posit AI service, meaning we only retain basic operational data for 30 days.

Pricing

Posit AI is an optional subscription starting at $20/month with a free trial. It includes a monthly allowance of credits to power Posit Assistant and unlimited use of NES. 

RStudio itself remains free and open-source. Using RStudio without AI will always remain free. The revenue from Posit AI funds our ongoing open-source mission.

For Enterprise Teams

For enterprise teams that require custom providers or stricter data boundaries, today also marks the release of Posit Workbench 2026.04.0 (Globemaster Allium). This release brings preview support for Posit Assistant to RStudio Pro and Positron Pro, complete with Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support for Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Azure Foundry, Google Vertex, and OpenAI. If your organization needs to keep model traffic within internally approved boundaries, Workbench now provides that path.

Try it out

You don't have to take our word for it.

Open RStudio, load the messiest dataset you have, and see what it feels like to have an assistant that actually understands your environment. Click the new Posit Assistant icon in the RStudio toolbar to start your free trial.
 

portrait of Nick Rohrbaugh

Nick Rohrbaugh

Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Posit, PBC
Nick helps people talk about the value in turning data into answers with code. When he's not talking about or wrangling data, you can find him wrangling his kids or running the trails of central Pennsylvania.

Alex Chisholm

Product Manager at Posit, PBC
Alex Chisholm is Product Manager for Posit Cloud and Posit Connect Cloud, online platforms to do and share data science. His career has been spent helping organizations use data to make evidence-based decisions and build insights products.

Tom Mock

Posit Workbench and RStudio IDE Product Manager
Tom Mock is a Product Manager at Posit, overseeing the Posit Workbench and RStudio team. He fell in love with R and data science through his graduate research, using R and RStudio to wrangle, analyze, model, and visualize my data. He became passionate about growing the R community and founded #TidyTuesday to help newcomers and seasoned vets improve their Tidyverse skills.