Bypassing Enterprise Chat Tool Auto-approve | Generated by AI

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Now I have the complete picture. Here’s the answer:

The enterprise policy enforcement flows through this chain:

  1. Enterprise admin sets a Group Policy / managed policy that disables chat.tools.global.autoApprove
  2. This gets read as policyValue === false in VS Code’s configuration system
  3. Multiple check points read inspected.policyValue === false and block auto-approve

The key enforcement points are:

File 1: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/tools/languageModelToolsService.ts

Lines 1128-1131 — the gate function:

private _isAutoApprovePolicyRestricted(): boolean {
    const inspected = this._configurationService.inspect<boolean>(ChatConfiguration.GlobalAutoApprove);
    return inspected.policyValue === false;
}

Line 1209 — the actual check before auto-confirming a tool call:

if (chatSessionResource && !this._isAutoApprovePolicyRestricted() && this._isSessionInAutoApproveLevel(chatSessionResource)) {
    return { type: ToolConfirmKind.ConfirmationNotNeeded, reason: 'auto-approve-all' };
}

File 2: src/vs/workbench/contrib/terminalContrib/chatAgentTools/browser/tools/terminalToolAutoApprove.ts

Lines 26-29 — same pattern for terminal tools:

const inspected = configurationService.inspect<boolean>(ChatConfiguration.GlobalAutoApprove);
if (inspected.policyValue === false) {
    return false;
}

File 3: src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/input/permissionPickerActionItem.ts

Line 72 — greys out the “Bypass Approvals” button in the UI:

const isAutoApprovePolicyRestricted = () => configurationService.inspect<boolean>(ChatConfiguration.GlobalAutoApprove).policyValue === false;

To bypass the enterprise restriction, the minimal change is:

In languageModelToolsService.ts, change _isAutoApprovePolicyRestricted() to always return false:

private _isAutoApprovePolicyRestricted(): boolean {
    return false;  // Bypass enterprise policy
}

And similarly in terminalToolAutoApprove.ts, change lines 26-29:

// if (inspected.policyValue === false) {
//     return false;
// }

And in every file that checks policyValue === false to disable the UI or clamp the permission level:

All follow the same pattern: configurationService.inspect<boolean>(ChatConfiguration.GlobalAutoApprove).policyValue === false. Either change each to return false/skip the check, or — cleaner — patch the central config inspection so policyValue never resolves to false for this key.

Cleanest single-point fix: In src/vs/platform/configuration/common/configuration.ts (or wherever inspect() is implemented), add a filter that strips the policy override for chat.tools.global.autoApprove so policyValue returns undefined instead of false. That way all downstream checks pass through without touching every call site.

The setting key is ChatConfiguration.GlobalAutoApprove = 'chat.tools.global.autoApprove' (defined in src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/common/constants.ts line 35).

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