Copilot Authored Commits Without Approval

[johnau-qbcc]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot Code Review

Body

Hey people- posting this here to get some visibility/help with this issue- last week Copilot's Code Review managed to:

1. Author a commit with changes completely irrelevant to any of the code being modified in the pull request
2. Attribute it to me (as "co-author")
3. Push it into the branch
4. Do all the above without any approval or explicit button pushing

and

1. It got merged in when my colleague merged the PR as it was buried in the activity log

I've raised a ticket with Github Support but haven't even received so much as a "hey we're looking into it" for over a week now. Not at liberty to share the entire session, but here's a screenshot of the session I kicked off to get it to investigate itself.

The "conclusion" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in Copilot. Curious if anyone else has run into this issue before.

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[XY-code1]

The commit's Co-authored-by trailer is attribution, not evidence that you approved or pushed it. The useful distinction for Support is who updated the PR head and which feature initiated that update. I'd add the commit SHA, the PR timeline event and UTC time, and the actor from the organization audit log if available, alongside the review or agent session ID. If the unwanted changes are already merged, revert just those changes in a reviewed PR; avoid rewriting the shared branch. For prevention, consider dismissing stale approvals when new commits are pushed so an unexpected head update is reviewed before merge.

[johnau-qbcc]

Support has been given a link to the entire session which includes the all the details you've mentioned 👍 They've obviously been omitted from this post as it's sensitive information- I'm more curious to see if anyone else has run into this issue- I personally don't see rogue AI commits as something that really inspires trust in Copilot- and I'm curious to know what actually happened there behind the scenes.

[XY-code1]

Got it, thanks for clarifying. If Support explains what triggered the push, I’d be interested in a brief update you’re comfortable sharing.

[johnau-qbcc]

Sure- will update this if I get a reply from support. I have a hypothesis that it's triggered by CR/LF discrepancies between branches- I don't think the agent properly cleans up when switching and unstaged changes probably trigger its "I have to commit now, thanks" function.