{
  "id": 7131596,
  "title": "Copilot Can Now Approve Pull Requests. Should It Count Toward Your Branch Protection?",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/13/copilot-can-now-approve-pull-requests-should-it-count-toward-your",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-13T16:07:51.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/pwd9000/copilot-can-now-approve-pull-requests-should-it-count-toward-your-branch-protection-2b78"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "GitHub has introduced a new feature that allows Copilot to approve pull requests, which could potentially count towards branch protection rules. Until recently, Copilot code reviews were merely suggestions, not approvals that could affect the merge process. However, on September 1, 2026, GitHub made Copilot reviews eligible for approval, allowing administrators to enable this capability. This means Copilot can now submit an approval that counts towards the required number of approvals for a pull request to be merged.\n\nAdditionally, GitHub implemented an auto-resolution feature for Copilot comments, enabling the system to automatically address review comments and run shell tools during the review process. The latest update on September 11, 2026, further enhanced the Copilot's capabilities by allowing it to resolve its own review comments and execute the full set of shell tools during the review. This enhancement has proven to be 47% more effective at addressing high-severity issues, 31% more effective for medium-severity issues, and 11% more effective for low-severity issues, while also reducing the review cost by approximately 8%.\n\nThe key takeaway is that while the improved capabilities of Copilot, such as building and testing code more efficiently, are generally positive, the ability for Copilot to approve pull requests directly implications on branch protection policies. Administrators can configure whether Copilot approvals count towards the required number of approvals for merge, providing flexibility in how Copilot's approvals integrate with existing branch protection rules.",
  "summary": "Copilot Can Now Approve Pull Requests. Should It Count Toward Your Branch Protection? Until this month, a Copilot code review was advice. It left a Comment review, never an Approve or Request changes , and GitHub's own documentation was explicit that Copilot reviews did not count toward required approvals. You could ignore it, act on it, or argue with it, but it never moved the merge button. On 1…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}