Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to Case Document
Summary
BAILII deployed an anti-bot verification page (Anubis) to protect against AI scraping. The system uses a proof-of-work scheme to add computational cost to mass automated access. The verification is presented via JavaScript and may conflict with browser privacy extensions like JShelter. This affects users attempting automated access to court decisions and legal databases.
What changed
BAILII implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot verification system, to block AI companies scraping court decisions and legal databases. The system adds computational cost to mass access requests without affecting individual users meaningfully. The verification requires modern JavaScript and may conflict with privacy-focused browser extensions.
Legal professionals and researchers using automated tools to access UK court decisions should disable privacy extensions like JShelter for BAILII domains. This creates operational friction for legitimate legal research automation while targeting mass AI scraping. No compliance obligations or regulatory requirements arise from this page.
Archived snapshot
Apr 18, 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.
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