AI Coding Agent Policy Gate for Risky Pull Requests

Best-fit situations

• A Codex or Claude Code run modifies authentication, billing, customer data, deployment, or legal-page code.
• A platform team wants risk-based merge rules without blocking every low-risk copy or test change.
• A vendor needs a repeatable policy record that shows clients how generated code was reviewed.
• A reviewer wants failed-test overrides and manual sign-off reasons in the same record as the PR.

Operating steps

1. Classify each changed file by actor, risk class, and ownership.
2. Require stronger evidence for auth, payment, PII, infrastructure, secrets, and legal files.
3. Bind test output, review comments, and manual approval to the exact risky files they cover.
4. Block or escalate merges when the evidence gap is material.
5. Export the policy decision so the team can explain why the AI-assisted PR was accepted.

Common risks

• A generic branch protection rule cannot tell which files were agent-authored.
• Reviewers approve a green PR while missing sensitive generated code.
• Override reasons live in chat instead of the merge evidence record.
• A strict gate blocks useful low-risk agent work because it lacks risk segmentation.