GitHub made general, on September 23, a set of more granular controls for automatic code review by Copilot. The central change is about access: personal review settings, previously limited to Copilot Pro, Pro+ and Max plans, now reach Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise licenses too, the ones most companies buy for entire teams.
In practice, every user gets a dedicated code review settings page, where they can turn on automatic Copilot reviews separately for three situations: when creating a pull request, when moving a pull request out of draft state, and when pushing a new commit to a PR Copilot is already reviewing. Before, there was only one general on/off switch, without this level of control.
The second relevant change is review effort. Copilot code review already ran at two levels, Lite, the faster standard review, and Balanced, a deeper analysis aimed at complex logic, security sensitive code and changes that cross multiple services. Now, authorized administrators of an enterprise account can fix one default effort level for the whole enterprise, which propagates by inheritance to the repositories of linked organizations, though individual organizations and repositories can still override that choice with their own setting.
The governance model follows the same pattern already used in other GitHub enterprise level policies: a centrally defined branch ruleset, applied to target organizations and repositories, with the "Automatically request Copilot code review" policy left to each organization's discretion, enabled for selected organizations, or disabled across the whole enterprise.
For development squads at Brazilian small and midsize companies already paying for Copilot Business, the practical gain is cutting noise without losing coverage: teams working with long draft PRs can choose not to trigger review until the PR leaves draft state, while teams that iterate fast with multiple pushes can choose to review only the final version. For engineering leaders at a larger company, the bigger news is the ability to standardize review effort automatically across every repository, instead of relying on each team to configure it manually, the kind of control that usually shows up only once a tool is already in wide enough use to need central policy.
Worth noting this expansion of controls lands alongside another change on the same front: Copilot code review's default effort level is set to move from Lite to Balanced in some contexts starting September 28, according to developer community reports. Teams relying on automatic review as a merge gate should review their effort configuration before that date, to avoid being caught off guard by a longer review time in the CI flow.
Sources
GitHub Changelog, official announcement: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-09-23-copilot-code-review-more-ways-to-request-and-configure-reviews/
GitHub Docs, official configuration documentation: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-on-github/set-up-copilot/configure-automatic-review
Windows Forum, independent coverage of the default level change: https://windowsforum.com/news/github-copilot-code-review-default-switches-to-balanced-september-28.445722/