GitHub Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise administrators can now centrally control which agent operations are blocked, require human approval, or can proceed without a prompt.

What the managed permissions cover

Managed permissions apply to three categories of agent activity: shell commands, file reads and edits, and network domains. This gives administrators fine-grained guardrails for sensitive operations without disabling agent workflows altogether.

Critically, these restrictions cannot be weakened by user or workspace settings, auto-approval, or previously saved approvals — and administrators can define specialized policies for different enterprise teams.

flowchart LR
    A[Copilot agent wants to run an operation] --> B{Enterprise managed policy}
    B -->|Deny| C[Operation blocked]
    B -->|Ask| D[Human approval required]
    B -->|Allow| E[Operation proceeds automatically]
    D -->|Approved| E
    D -->|Rejected| C

Where it’s available

The controls are generally available in the GitHub Copilot app, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Visual Studio Code sessions that use Agent Host.