Copilot code review says "Approval recommended" but always submits COMMENTED, never APPROVED

[harupy]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

In mlflow/mlflow, Copilot says “🟢 Approval recommended” but submits COMMENTED, never APPROVED, despite PR approvals being enabled.

Configuration: Enterprise policy defers to organizations; organization policy defers to repositories. The repository’s “Allow Copilot to approve pull requests” toggle is ON, with “File paths” blank.

Evidence:

• Across the 100 most recently updated PRs, all 78 Copilot reviews were COMMENTED; 18 said “Approval recommended.” These were never submitted as approvals, so stale-review dismissal is not involved.
• This affects maintainer PRs from forks (#25584), outside contributors (#25509), and Copilot-authored PRs (#25567).
• Review logs include EnableAutoApproval=true and InlineApprovalReadinessReasoning=true.
• Raising required approvals from 0 to 1 on September 3 did not help: #25567 still received COMMENTED with “Approval recommended.”

Is another prerequisite missing, particularly for PRs from forks? Do the “count toward merge requirements” settings affect whether Copilot submits APPROVED, or only whether it counts toward merging? Does EnableAutoApproval=true reflect our configuration or an internal rollout flag?

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[rafidahmed01]

This is most likely expected behavior for the current public preview.

“Approval recommended” appears to indicate that Copilot considers the PR ready for approval, but it does not necessarily mean that the review will be submitted with an APPROVED state.

The settings such as “Count Copilot approvals toward merge requirements” appear to control whether an approval can satisfy branch/merge requirements, rather than forcing Copilot to submit an APPROVED review.

Since the feature is still in public preview, the EnableAutoApproval=true flag in the Actions logs also may not be sufficient to conclude that auto-approval is enabled for every PR.

For now, I would treat COMMENTED as expected behavior unless GitHub confirms otherwise, especially for fork-based PRs. GitHub should clarify whether actual APPROVED reviews are currently supported for all PR sources, including forks.

[harupy]

Thanks for the comment. In the demo recording attached on https://github.blog/changelog/2026-09-01-copilot-code-review-can-now-approve-pull-requests/, Copilot did approve a PR.

[shajibsikder]

This is by design in GitHub Copilot Code Review.

GitHub Copilot generates an AI review summary with suggestions (which might say "Approval recommended"), but it will always submit the review state as 'COMMENTrather thanAPPROVE` for two primary reasons:

1. Security & Governance Safety: GitHub prevents automated AI bots from satisfying mandatory "Require approval from code owners" or "Require approving review" branch protection rules. Human oversight is required to approve PR merges.
2. Bot Permission Scope: The Copilot bot token does not have explicit write/approve permissions on PR review states across organization repositories.

Recommended Workarounds:

• Use human review sign-offs to satisfy branch protection rules after evaluating Copilot's automated suggestions.
• If you use custom CI workflows, you can trigger a GitHub Action (actions/github-script) on PR review events to parse the Copilot summary and programmatically approve if specific criteria pass.

[harupy]

Did you read https://github.blog/changelog/2026-09-01-copilot-code-review-can-now-approve-pull-requests/?

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