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

[harupy]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

Repo: https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow (public, open source)

This is about Copilot code review can now approve pull
requests
(2026-09-01). The feature is in public preview, so this may just be a preview
gap, but I would like to know whether what we see is expected. Copilot code review runs
on essentially every PR in our repo and the reviews are genuinely useful. It has
never once submitted an approving review, including on PRs where its own
overview comment says it is ready to approve.

Our configuration

All three admin layers are permissive, each deferring to the one below it:

• Enterprise policy "Allow Copilot to approve pull requests": set to let
  organizations decide.
• Organization policy for the same setting: set to let repositories decide.
• Repository -> Settings -> Copilot code review: "Allow Copilot to approve pull
  requests" is toggled ON.
• The "File paths" field is blank. Per the docs, "Leave blank to count approvals
  for all files", so this should not be filtering anything out.

So nothing above the repository is saying no, and the repository is saying yes.

What we observe

• Across the 100 most recently updated PRs, copilot-pull-request-reviewer
  submitted 78 reviews. All 78 are COMMENTED. Zero are APPROVED.
• 18 of those 78 rendered "🟢 Approval recommended" in the review overview and
  were still submitted as COMMENTED.
• Those 18 span org members' PRs from personal forks
  (#25584,
  #25578,
  #25533), an outside
  contributor's PR (#25509), and
  Copilot-authored PRs (#25567,
  #25544). So this is not
  "Copilot will not approve its own work".
• None of these are stale-approval-dismissed cases. The reviews were submitted
  as COMMENTED in the first place, not approved and later dismissed by a new
  commit.
• The Actions run backing each review (event dynamic, path
  dynamic/agents/copilot-pull-request-reviewer) logs a detector flag string
  that includes EnableAutoApproval=true and
  InlineApprovalReadinessReasoning=true. Example run:
  https://github.com/mlflow/mlflow/actions/runs/33862698768

Already ruled out

• Branch protection requiring zero approvals. On 2026-09-03 we raised
  required_approving_review_count from 0 to 1 in our master ruleset. The
  next review (#25567) still came
  back "Approval recommended" and COMMENTED.

Questions

1. With every documented layer permissive and no path filters, is there some
   further prerequisite for Copilot to actually submit an approving review? By
   the documented settings this should already be working, which is why I
   suspect a bug rather than a misconfiguration on our side.
2. Am I right that the organization setting "Count Copilot approvals toward
   merge requirements" and the second repository toggle "Allow Copilot approvals
   to count toward merge requirements" only govern whether an approval satisfies
   merge rules, and cannot cause the review to be submitted as COMMENTED
   instead of APPROVED? The naming makes this ambiguous.
3. Does EnableAutoApproval=true in the Actions run log reflect our
   configuration, or is it an unrelated internal rollout flag? If it reflects
   our config, it and the resulting COMMENTED state contradict each other.
4. Will Copilot approve PRs opened from forks? Nearly all our PRs, maintainers
   included, come from personal forks, and the docs do not mention forks either
   way.

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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 does approve a PR. If this was expected, I'd be surprised.