Can Copilot Approve Pull Requests?

There are two different questions inside this one, and they have different answers. Can Copilot look at a pull request and tell you what it thinks? Can its verdict count as the approval that unblocks a merge? People searching for this usually want the second and get articles about the first.

Can it review a pull request?

In the sense most people mean, yes: assistants of this kind read a diff and leave comments and suggested changes on it, the same surface a human reviewer writes into. That is genuinely useful for the mechanical layer of review, the missing null check, the test that was not updated, the thing you would have caught on a good day and missed on a Friday.

What it is not is a second opinion in the sense that matters on a risky change. It has not sat in the design discussion, it does not know which customer complained, and it will comment on the code you showed it rather than the code you did not.

Can it approve, in the branch protection sense?

This is where you should stop trusting any article, this one included. Whether a review posted by an assistant can count towards a required number of approvals is decided by two things: what the platform permits, and what your repository's own rules say. Both change, and the platform side has changed more than once. Read GitHub's current documentation and then look at the protection rules on your own repository, because a rule requiring a review from a named team or a code owner will settle it regardless of what the assistant is capable of.

A separate cluster of searches sits next to this one and is not about code at all: approving a Copilot agent inside an organisation's admin tooling is an administrator permissions question, handled in that organisation's own controls, not in a pull request.

Should it, even if it can?

An approving review is a signature. It says a person looked at this and is prepared to be associated with it going in. A machine can produce the comment but not the accountability, and teams that quietly let a bot satisfy the approval requirement usually discover they have not sped up review, they have removed it while keeping the paperwork.

The useful arrangement is the obvious one. Let the assistant go first and clear the mechanical faults, so the human reviewer spends attention on intent, blast radius and the question of whether this change should exist. That is a real speed up, and it survives an incident review.

What does that leave the human doing?

Reading, and pressing yes a great many times a day. That last part is the only bit we can help with, and only at the desk: a pair of large buttons like Slam Buttons at $29 moves accept and reject off the keyboard so answering stops interrupting whatever your hands were doing. It changes nothing about the review itself, which is the part that decides whether the merge was a good idea.

If you are the person doing all the approving, the ergonomics of that are covered in reducing repetitive strain from constant accept and reject clicking.