GitHub Copilot Can Now Formally Approve Pull Requests, Counting Toward Branch Rules

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GitHub updated its Copilot code review tool on 1 September 2026, allowing it to submit approvals that count toward a repository's required-approvals rule, the same way a human teammate's approval would. Previously, Copilot only left advisory comments and its reviews explicitly did not satisfy branch protection requirements. Administrators must actively enable the feature, and the approval is automatically dismissed if new commits are pushed, mirroring existing human-review behaviour. A follow-up update on 11 September added shell-tool execution during reviews, auto-resolution of Copilot's own comments, and an ensemble of agents that GitHub says improved detection of high-severity issues by 47%. The changes are currently in public preview and subject to change, raising governance questions about how AI approvals interact with enterprise and repository-level branch protection policies.

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