Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EWHC/Ch/2026/830
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a Proof-of-Work-based anti-bot verification system, to prevent AI companies from scraping legal databases. The system requires visitors to complete a computational challenge before accessing case content. This is a technical access-control measure, not a regulatory instrument.
Automated legal research systems and AI-powered document analysis tools that scrape BAILII will encounter this Proof-of-Work barrier. Teams running such workflows should evaluate whether to adjust their access methods or seek authorised data feeds.
What changed
The BAILII website implemented Anubis, a Proof-of-Work challenge system modelled on Hashcash, to deter mass AI web scraping. All visitors must complete a computational verification before accessing case content.
Technology companies, researchers, and legal professionals using automated scraping tools to access UK court decisions may be blocked by this verification. Organisations relying on large-scale legal database extraction should review alternative access methods.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 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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