Anubis Bot Verification Blocks Access to Case
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot verification system, to protect its server resources against aggressive AI web scraping. The system requires users to complete a proof-of-work challenge before accessing case documents. BAILII states this is a temporary measure while more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting is developed.
What changed
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot verification system, as a protective measure against AI companies scraping court databases. The system presents users with a computational challenge before granting access to case documents. This is a technical access mechanism, not a court ruling or regulatory document — it creates no compliance obligations, penalties, or legal precedent. The measure aims to reduce server load from mass scraping while a more permanent fingerprinting solution is developed.
Affected parties — including legal researchers, attorneys, and members of the public seeking court records — may experience additional access steps when using automated tools or browsers with JavaScript-blocking extensions. No regulatory action or legal change is required from any party.
What to do next
- Monitor for updates
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 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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