Anubis Anti-Bot Page Blocks Case Access
Summary
BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot challenge page, to protect its servers against aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style computational burden that is negligible for individual users but expensive at mass-scraper scale. Users with JavaScript-disabling browser extensions such as JShelter are required to disable them to access case content.
What changed
BAILII added an Anubis proof-of-work challenge page as a technical access control barrier. The page presents a computational proof-of-work requirement to visitors before serving legal case content, aimed at raising the cost of automated scraping by AI companies. Users with privacy plugins like JShelter that disable JavaScript will be blocked and must whitelist the domain.
Affected parties, primarily legal professionals and researchers relying on BAILII for case law access, may need to adjust browser settings or whitelist BAILII domains to continue accessing materials. This is a technical access measure rather than a regulatory change with compliance obligations.
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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