Anubis Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to UK Supreme Court Judgments
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute), which hosts UK Supreme Court judgments, has deployed Anubis — a Proof-of-Work anti-bot protection mechanism — on its judgment listing page. The system presents users with a JavaScript challenge designed to deter AI web scrapers by imposing computational overhead that becomes significant at scale. Users with JavaScript-blocking browser extensions such as JShelter must disable those extensions to access the site. No compliance obligations, penalties, or legal changes are created by this informational page.
“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.”
About this source
GovPing monitors UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII) for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 2 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a Hashcash-style Proof-of-Work challenge, as a placeholder measure to reduce AI scraping of UK Supreme Court judgment pages. The technical explanation states that at individual user scale the additional computational load is negligible, but at mass scraper scale it significantly increases the cost and difficulty of automated access. The page notes that longer-term solutions involve fingerprinting headless browsers via font rendering so legitimate users can bypass the challenge. No legal obligations, compliance deadlines, or regulatory changes result from this informational page.
For legal professionals and researchers relying on BAILII access: users should ensure JavaScript is enabled and disable any content-blocking extensions (such as JShelter) when accessing judgment listings to avoid being blocked by the Proof-of-Work challenge.
Archived snapshot
Apr 23, 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!
Loading...
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.
Related changes
Get daily alerts for UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII)
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
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.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when UK Supreme Court Judgments (BAILII) publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.