Microsoft's AI 'Copilot' automatically inserts ads into pull requests.



A developer reported that when they called Copilot in a GitHub pull request, ads were automatically inserted.

notes: copilot edited an ad into my pr

https://notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited-an-ad-into-my-pr/

According to developer Zach Munson, when a team member called Copilot to correct a typo in Munson's pull request, Copilot edited the pull request description and added advertisements for their company and their productivity tool, Raycast.

Several comments have been posted on the social media site Hacker News regarding this matter. For example, one comment states, 'This 'advertisement' is nothing new. Microsoft seems to consider it a 'hint' rather than an advertisement. Copilot added the hint feature after May 2025. GitHub Copilot was released in May 2025, so it basically displays ads from the start.'

You can see that the hints are actually displayed in the pull request submitted in May 2025.



A person identifying himself as 'Tim from the Copilot Coding Agent team' commented, 'We have been including product hints in pull requests created by the Copilot Coding Agent. Our aim was to help developers utilize the agent in new ways within their workflows. However, after reviewing your

feedback and reconsidering the matter, we have realized that this was a mistake. We will not be doing this again.'

Some have pointed out that searching for the phrase '⚡ Quickly spin up copilot coding tasks' brings up a ton of results from Copilot stating, 'With Raycast, you can quickly launch Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine.'



A GitHub representative stated, 'We have already disabled it. While pull requests originating from Copilot provided hints about products that were somewhat problem-free, we added a feature that worked in any pull request by mentioning Copilot, and the behavior became unpleasant.'




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