Microsoft admitted that the mention of Copilot in merge requests on GitHub happened by accident

What happened: Copilot advertising in Pull‑Requests
1️⃣ Appearance of “advertising” suggestions
At the beginning of this week several developers noticed that phrases resembling advertisements for Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, appeared in comments on merge requests (pull requests) on GitHub.

- The first observer was a programmer from Melbourne, Zach Mason. He saw such a “tip” in his project’s PR on March 30 after asking Copilot to fix a code error.

- The suggestions looked less like ordinary code improvement tips and more like an advertising slogan.

2️⃣ Why it was unexpected
Copilot has long been integrated into GitHub, helping authors automatically generate changes. But now users discovered that alongside them appeared a mention of Raycast – a popular third‑party search tool for macOS and Windows.

> “It’s awful. I knew this nonsense would eventually happen, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” said Mason.

3️⃣ Microsoft’s response
Microsoft immediately clarified the situation:

- There is no advertising on GitHub, nor are there plans to add it.

- The appearance of “advertising” suggestions was a mistake, not an intentional feature.

- Testing for ad display in PR comments has never been conducted.

- The error arose from a logical bug in the code that allowed Copilot to output such messages in regular merge requests created by humans.

> “GitHub does not show or plan to show advertising. We discovered a programming logic issue in the GitHub Copilot agent’s suggestions that appeared in the wrong context in pull request comments. We removed these agent suggestions from PR comments,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.

4️⃣ What it means for developers – Keep using Copilot: it remains a useful automation and code quality improvement tool.

- Be vigilant: occasionally unexpected suggestions may appear in PRs, but they do not contain advertising content.

- Check the comments: if you see something odd, report it to GitHub/Microsoft support.

Bottom line: Copilot advertising in merge requests appeared due to a technical error, and Microsoft confirmed that it does not plan to place ads on GitHub. The suggestions have been removed and will no longer appear in PR comments.