Anti-Bot Verification Blocks Access to BAILII Case Content
Summary
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its database to protect server resources against aggressive AI scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style computational challenge that imposes negligible load on individual users but significantly increases the cost of mass automated scraping operations. The system requires modern JavaScript and is incompatible with privacy plugins like JShelter.
“Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam.”
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 201 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII added Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot verification system, to protect its servers against aggressive AI company scraping. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges that are negligible for individual legitimate users but cumulatively expensive for mass scrapers. The long-term goal is to transition to fingerprinting headless browsers so the proof-of-work challenge does not need to be presented to verified legitimate users.
Legal database operators and legal technology companies that rely on automated access to UK case law through scraping should review their access methods. The system requires disabling privacy plugins such as JShelter for the protected domain, which may affect practitioners who use such tools for other purposes.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
Related changes
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