A technical flaw in Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence assistant sparked widespread controversy within the GitHub community, after unwanted messages appeared inside pull requests.
Reports revealed that more than 11,000 pull requests included a promotional message encouraging users to run Copilot tasks via the Raycast tool, even though these messages were not required of users.
The problem began when one of the developers noticed that this message was added automatically after using Copilot to correct a simple error, before others confirmed that they were exposed to the same situation, which prompted some to consider it a form of advertising within the platform.
For its part, Microsoft denied any intention to include advertisements, explaining that the reason was due to a software glitch that led to these messages appearing in places not intended for them, as they were supposed to appear as suggestions within specific contexts only.
The company also confirmed that the problem was fixed and the system was updated to prevent it from recurring, while Raycast denied the existence of any marketing partnership with Microsoft.
