Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to BAILII Case
Summary
The BAILII website is currently blocking automated access to case documents via an anti-bot verification page (Anubis) that presents a proof-of-work challenge. The page explains that AI companies aggressively scraping BAILII have caused server downtime, and the proof-of-work scheme is a temporary measure while fingerprinting techniques for headless browsers are developed. Users are instructed to disable the JShelter browser extension for the domain to access content.
“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.”
About this source
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the open-access publisher of UK case law. The England and Wales Recent Decisions feed aggregates every newly published judgment from the High Court, Court of Appeal, and specialist divisions: Chancery, Commercial Court, Administrative Court, Family, Patents, Technology and Construction. Around 200 published opinions a month. BAILII is the closest thing to a free Westlaw for UK judgments and the standard citation source for academic and practitioner work that does not have a paid database licence. GovPing tracks each new decision as it appears, with the case name, court, judge, and citation. Watch this if you brief English commercial litigation, follow Chancery and TCC trends, or research UK judgments from outside a paid platform.
What changed
The BAILII website has deployed Anubis, an anti-bot verification system using a Hashcash-style proof-of-work challenge, to prevent AI companies from scraping its legal database. The system adds computational load for automated scrapers while minimally affecting individual human users. The site notes this is a temporary solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting methods for detecting headless browsers are developed.
Legal researchers and automated tools attempting to access BAILII case documents will encounter a verification challenge and must disable certain browser extensions (such as JShelter) to proceed. This does not create any regulatory obligations but represents a technical access control that may affect legal research workflows relying on automated data collection.
Archived snapshot
Apr 24, 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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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
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